200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening – The Marginalian

Spiritual Rewards of Gardening

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. 

BY MARIA POPOVA

Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.

Perhaps because the life of a garden is also a vivid reminder that anything of beauty and radiance takes time, takes care, takes devotion to seed and sprout and bloom, gardens have long been living cathedrals for the creative spirit. 

Here, drawn from a lifetime of marginalia on great writers' and artists' letters and diaries, essays and novels, is a florilegium of my favorite exultations in the rewards and nourishments of gardens:  https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/05/07/writers-artists-gardens/?mc_cid=5ff6bcba7c&mc_eid=c105bd900f