The Secret in the Garden
I
had two ladies to tea, iced, on my wide southern porch this week. One
was a passionate gardener, and the other, a writer whose passion is
finding the right phrase.
We
looked over my gardens—the meadow, the wildlife habitat, and the secret
garden. The overflowing pink Texas skullcap, salvia, wood rose,
trailing periwinkle, and drifting Mexican feather grass in the planters
edging the perfect white columns in comfortable disarray. My mission was
to make the gardens look like they had just happened. The gardener
understood with an unspoken keenness. Of course, getting any garden to
just happen in this day of drought and brutal heat is almost a miracle.
My
spring yard work came to a close this week with the pruning of my
favorite antique roses—Old Blush and Duchess de Brabant. I positioned
the cuts to encourage new growth and erased dead wood. I checked that
the overall shapes and heights were pleasing to the eye.
Later
that day, I approached an old manuscript with the same vigor. I cut out
the lines that didn’t need to be there, shortened lines to a point, and
left room for thoughts to grow. Do my sentences flow the way I need
them to go? Is the story satisfying? Do the words look like they just
happened?
A
writer and once my teacher, Marjorie Facklam, said that “writing should
be invisible.” How hard a writer must work to have the words and
sentences look like they just happened, to be clear and enlightening, so
the reader sees only the true story. What talent the reader might say,
when, in fact, it is more dedication and perspiration. Any talent lies
in being able to see what could be in the barren land or the white space
of paper or the blank computer screen.
The
secret in the garden is to work passionately with what you have, what
will grow in the soil that is your life—to find that comfortable
disarray that is your voice. A secret understood by my fellow gardener
and writer friends.
