My Mississippi role model, Eudora Welty, interspersed writing with gardening or vice versa. Two of my current writer friends, Kimberly Willis Holt and Jo Hackl do, too. I am in good company as I take a break from putting words on a page to dig in the dirt. Eudora’s gardens have been maintained and kept according to her plan since her death and make a great place to visit since they are open to the public. I get the feeling that Kimberly and Jo also intentionally plan their gardens though they have been too far away for me to check this theory out. I am a random gardener and like to think I have an English garden. In reality, it is more like Aunt Maude in the country who populated her yard with cuttings from the neighbors.
When I have been in my chair too long or when I am stuck for the next set of words, I head out to the yard. A peculiar thing happens as I pull weeds, dig a hole, or prune a bush. My brain that has refused to work under pressure, jumps into gear as I relax with plants and dirt.
On a trip through the garden section of Lowe’s back in the summer, I purposefully bought some plants and spotted an orphan bag of six paperwhites on the way out. Now, I’m not going to get in a long discussion of nomenclature here and will just acknowledge that their whole class of plants is referred to as some form of narcissus. However, in my childhood labels, the yellow ones were daffodils and the white ones were narcissus, and I tend to stick with what I learned as a child, especially if there is a story involved. I loved the mythological account of the Greek youth who so loved his own reflection in the pool of water that he remained there until he took root and turned into the flower called Narcissus. I added the bag to my cart on a whim, planted them when I got home, and forgot about them.
My favorite gardening task has been the norm for the last month – raking leaves. I can’t remember when I did not love raking leaves. Additionally, our Mississippi garden guru, Felder Rushing, advises raking them and piling them onto flower beds to give a blanket from the cold while it enriches and texturizes the soil. My brown blankets mark my flower beds until some of my randomness pops up. Imagine my surprise last week when six sets of green blades pushed up amid the brown leaves, and an even greater surprise when the tops began to burst into shiny white clusters. Their beauty against the fallen leaves gives credence to the story of a youth who could not take his gaze away from the reflection of himself in the pool of water.
Sometimes gardening releases a new idea for a story or a poem. Sometimes it clears a path through a roadblock where I’m stuck, and sometimes it brings on a blog.