More from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. She’s not a gardener herself, but she really wants one of the characters in her book to have a garden. As she learns about gardening, she enlists the help of her friends who garden and a local nurseryman to help her create an authentic, if imaginary garden. Here, she talks about why she wanted the garden in her book, and how she approached creating the garden. (PS I don’t know which of her novels this book appears in. Bird by Bird is the only book by Lamott I’ve read. If you know, feel free to let us know!) I also think she brings up some interesting points about why we garden, points (a bit barbed at times) we overlook or sublimate because we love to garden so much.

Take it away, Anne:

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer. So I felt a little understaffed here, loving the metaphor when I came upon it, wanting to work with it, and yet not loving to garden.

I didn’t know where to start, but I did know that the garden [in my mind and later in my book] did not start out as metaphor. It started out as paradise. Then, as now, the garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanismm like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving you hav tasted and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is–because in the garden the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up clsoe so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph–and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it! What a great metaphor!

Related posts:

1. Letting go of perfectionism, Bird by Bird
2. Build a Bird Feeder with Dad for Father’s Day
3. The Fabric of our Lives
4. Kieran Egan on Pre-work in Zen Gardens (and Life)
5. Lessons from Ledge & Gardens