The Promise of a Garden
Gardens as joy, creative inspiration, and healing.
Keep it wild // DIVE Spring 2025 writing group starts next week, last chance to sign up!
Hello friends,
A few weeks ago, we went about building raised beds. For the last decade, I have tended an assortment of planter boxes on a deck. But in the new place that we moved to last summer, there is a garden plot, well-cared for over the years by the woman who called this place home before us. Complete with lots of mushroom compost, so I am told.
Last weekend, we had a surprise visit from two men who were there to install new mason bee cocoons. A black plastic box that sits at the edge of the garden had been a source of curiosity—some building project that never came to fruition? some storage device?—and now my husband and I learned what it was actually for: breeding native pollinators.
One of the men opened up a small box to show me a bunch of dormant bees. A few were just starting to wake up, exuding a slight buzz and twitch of their little bodies. The cocoons were placed in small wooden boxes with lots of holes in them—imagine an insect hotel—which were then placed in the black box.
I asked how many bees were now in there.
“About 1,600.”
Those bees will get to work laying new eggs, which will be collected in June, then held at a very low temperature to keep them dormant until next year’s pollination season. The bees will then be taken to commercial orchards, used to ensure the production of fruit and even almond crops. That’s essential work when there’s a pollination crisis.
A fifth of native pollinators are at an elevated risk of extinction according to a new report released this week. That includes bees, beetles, butterflies, moths, flower flies, bats, and hummingbirds. But it’s the worst for the bees: over a third of the native bee species assessed in the study are at risk.
I was told that before the crew comes to collect the new bee larvae in June, a few of the adult bees may find their way to a dead tree in the neighborhood and settle in there. I like knowing that this cycle is taking place, that there’s potential of new bee neighbors. It makes me want to plant a few more pollinator-friendly flowers.
I go out to the raised beds every day right now to see if anything has sprouted. Good news: the arugula is on its way. Every single development in the garden feels like cause for celebration.
The same goes for the forest. I’ve been on trillium watch as usual, and just this week I spotted bracken fern popping their heads out of the ground. They’re far from unfurling, but they’ll get there. I spotted my first salmonberry blossom this week. That too will change, eventually ready to be picked and eaten.
As my friend Chris Rurik wrote, a practice of deep attention cultivates a kind of seasonal rhythm that you grow used to when you spend years and years in the same place.
“I know this place well, in all seasons. I know how these plants, from such simple early forms, will rise and branch into a structured canopy, how white and pink flowers will appear and attract bees and flies and hummingbirds, how gnats will gather, how the hedge-nettle’s leaves will grow ragged with caterpillar holes, how birds and wasps and fruits and mildews and moths will, by autumn’s end, have played out, in miniature, the rise and fall of a civilization.”
The garden has its own rhythm. The time to dream about what could be, the time to prep the pots and beds, the time to push seeds into the ground, the time to wait and see what happens.
Writers and creative spirits seem to be particularly drawn to gardens. Ferris Jabr and I discussed this in an interview last summer. For many, these places of flora and fauna that we actively tend offer not just inspiration, but also help to inform a worldview.
Gardens are a place of potential. Niki de Saint Phalle described what she felt in her garden: “I lost all notion of time, and the limitations of normal life were abolished. I felt comforted and transported. Here, everything was possible.”
They also offer a place to land, a place to restore. Oliver Sacks once described gardens as “essential to the creative process.” Gardens can be a powerful balm. In his essay “The Healing Power of Gardens,” Sacks wrote:
“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.”
I’ve recently been reading Lucy Jones’ Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul. In the chapter that I just finished, I learned that during WWI, soldiers would sometimes garden in the trenches, raising flowers in the midst of war. British men at the Ruhleben internment camp in Germany petitioned to be able to garden. Granted permission, they grew everything from nasturtiums to dahlias to sweet peas.
“Planting might have given the men a sense of hope for the future at a time of extreme uncertainty,” writes Jones. “To plant seeds is to believe you will see them grow. The leaves would uncurl, the birds would sing, the flowers would open; nature would endure long after the war had ended.”
After yanking out invasive blackberry and ivy around the yard other day, I thought about why there is such a draw to gardening in the first place. Tending something, yes. But it scratches at something deeper.
If you’re a writer or an artist, you’re used to having a creative practice to come to. You are used to having a place to generate ideas, build on them, watch a project grow and come to fruition. As humans, we all have creative capacity. That drive to create and build something exists in all of us, but not everyone gives themselves the outlet for it. I think gardens serve that purpose for a lot of people.
The planning and the plotting. The dreaming and the hoping. The act of bringing something new to life, something that did not exist there before. But also, the letting go. Accepting that in the garden and the environment, things will never go exactly according to plan. You make an agreement to respond accordingly.
In these early days of spring, the garden is certainly a place for process. The potential outcome is so far away, all you can do is dig, plant, prepare. Be thrilled that a tiny piece of green has pierced its way through the earth.
//
Back in February, I walked down a snow-covered sidewalk in Minneapolis. I stopped to look at some tall sunflower skeletons.
At some point the previous spring, someone had chosen to plant these, push seeds into the ground. The flowers had stretched tall, glorious orbs of yellow. Once their season was over, they had remained. Even without their leaves and their petals, they stood there in the cold air, holding their own.
A reminder of what had been, but also, what could come again.
-Anna
CREATIVE PROMPTS FOR SPRING
Last year I hosted a little 5-day creative retreat called Unfurling. For those of you who are new to Creative Fuel, or maybe even for those who want to work through those prompts again, you can do this self-guided retreat at any time.
Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3 / Day 4 / Day 5
Young creatives and all you artists out there who know young people: check out the ACLU’s The Future Echoes: A Zine Anthology. This archival project is designed to document young people’s thoughts and attitudes about current US political, social, economic, ecological, and cultural issues through zines. Next submission deadline is May 5, 2025. Young people ages 15-24 are able to submit. For those of us who are a little older, check out the previous submissions and there’s also a zine toolkit for educators and community leaders.
I love Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman’s way of applying the scientific method to creativity.
100,000 suspended dried flowers. Now on display in London if you happen to be there.
Sonja Peterson’s papercuts.
UPCOMING CREATIVE FUEL WORKSHOPS
DIVE Seasonal Writing Group // Spring 2025
Last chance to sign up for the spring edition of the seasonal writing group DIVE!
DIVE Spring 2025 starts next week and runs through June. Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins from facilitator Kerri Anne and monthly meetings with fellow writers.
There is a Tuesday cohort and a Thursday cohort to pick from.
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I love picturing the insect hotel 🐝🐛🦋🐞🪲
I have a spreadsheet palette brain!