Artists and poets explore the ways gardening helps us experience the wonders of nature, tap into our unconscious minds, and bolster our creativity.

images by Mary Jo Hoffman from her book Still, published by Phaidon

How interesting it is that so many artists, writers, poets, and musicians gravitate to gardening. One creative act begets another, after all. And gardening, like art, is process oriented. “It involves creative problem-solving, which is an important aspect of art,” according to artist and Turner Farm Community Gardens Director Peter Huttinger, who gardens alongside potters, jewelers, photographers, and even a puppeteer.

Many hardworking creative people turn to the hard work of gardening in their free time. And in turn, caring for plants seems to fertilize their imaginations.

Gardening enforces physical presence and sustained attention, says musician, poet, and Clermont College English Professor Phoebe Reeves. Reeves’s poetry has a naturalistic immediacy that seems to sprout from the Mount Washington soil she’s tended for 13 years. She’s ripped up plastic, broken shovels, and rearranged plants both by accident and by necessity (such as transplanting tomatoes out from under a black walnut tree, which is toxic to other plants).

The Ultimate Reality Experience

Reeves’s chapbook The Gardener and the Garden (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) is dense with the dramas and denizens of the garden, encapsulating in microcosm issues of sustainability, survival, and existential urgency. While Reeves had the sort of sap-sticky, shoes-optional Upstate New York childhood that invests a budding poet with appreciation for the natural world, her youth also unfolded right down the road from several nuclear reactors. So cultivation’s opposite, annihilation, often lurks just beyond the perimeter of Reeves’s poems. Her most recent collection, Helen of Bikini, contrasts natural imagery with nuclear horror.

To talk about artists’ gardens, you have to consider what they stand apart from, as literal and metaphorical spaces encroached on by the symbolic black walnuts of day-to-day living.

“Gardening can give a lot to writing,” Reeves says. “I don’t know that it goes the other way as clearly, except that they’re both practices in patience and failure. But that’s true of any making, right? You could say the same thing about painting or any physical discipline.

“It’s also a refuge from the mind,” she continues. “Because you cannot do that thing where you’re trying to disassociate from your body when you’re gardening.” What’s more, gardening is “the ultimate anti-capitalist activity,” she says, “because nothing gives gardeners more pleasure than giving plants away.”

Our freewheeling conversation about creativity and gardening, which we held at Luckman Coffee in Mount Washington, turned to the concern Reeves feels over her students’ understandable desire that their college experience will land them a high-paying job. “That comes at the expense of their sense of play and curiosity,” she says. “And if they’re so afraid of failing that they’re scared to try anything, then it’s very hard to teach them anything.”

That fear speaks to both the status quo and to gardens as havens apart from daily concerns. “That Mary Oliver poem is over-quoted for a reason,” Reeves says:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

There’s more to Reeves’ attraction to gardening than a love of perennial flowers and fresh basil and a delight in close observation of nature. “Gardening is frustrating,” she says. “And that actually might be one of the things I like about it. There are no shortcuts. There is no alt-truth. You cannot ask an AI large-language model to summarize your gardening. You just have to do it.”

The writer, psychotherapist, and gardener Sue Stuart-Smith explores this paradox in The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature. “Shaping a bit of reality is empowering, but crucially in the garden, we are never in control,” she writes. “The general rule in life is that we thrive best in situations where we have some control but not complete control. A total lack of control is stressful, and too much control is unstimulating, because life becomes boring and predictable.”

Seeking the Alternative

A restless sense of fun that flirts with failure, the need for spaces apart from the mainstream—these concepts permeate Peter Huttinger’s life and work, both artistic and horticultural.

Huttinger grew up in Florida before earning an MFA at the University of Cincinnati. An avid surfer in his youth, he says, “we gravitated to the ocean, we gravitated to the swamps. It’s kind of like we really wanted that engagement with nature. It wasn’t cognitive or a decision. It was just more fun.”

Huttinger’s artwork has constantly changed but has always shown a preoccupation with metamorphosis. His early visual work retains the process of its creation, preserving evidence of erasure and debris on the page, he says, “to give you a sense of both memory and urgency.”

He went on to incorporate decaying plant and even animal matter. Later works included a tongue-in-cheek “Orgone Accumulator,” based on a pseudo-scientific device that purported to harness the life energy of the universe. And in the Contemporary Arts Center’s 2012 exhibition Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses, and Abandoned Lots, he and Vicki Mansoor exhibited a futuristic chicken coop that now resides at Homeadow Song Farm, the land the couple oversees.

His involvement in community gardens, directing the Civic Garden Center’s community gardens program before coming to Turner Farm, extends an early involvement in artist-run spaces. “There’s a direct parallel between artist-run spaces and community gardens just in terms of the way they function,” he says. “They seek to be alternatives.”

He came to community gardens seeking “a different cognitive experience,” he says. “In community gardening, working in the nonprofit realm, I’m interested in creating a culture of generosity and sharing.”

Huttinger got involved in community gardens right around the time he began working on what he calls his Fertility Series, works that included eggs casting shadows on a gallery wall. As the eggs decay it becomes incumbent on the gallery to replace them. At that time Huttinger says, his “detached intellectual view of nature became more visceral in terms of working processes, growing food, particularly composting and soil building.”

He has come to see parallels, actual and conceptual, between the healthy roots, microbes, and fungi that connect living things, and the social and economic networks in which gardeners and artists eke out creative lives. Huttinger’s work building soil connects with his interest in politics and economics. “All of a sudden you start thinking about, well, what is the relationship between an economy that’s based on growth and consumption as opposed to (self-sustainment)? How can you find a balance between your inputs and outputs so that you don’t deplete and totally rape the soil?

“When you work in community gardens you get involved in city government and you start seeing the impact on that from the state and federal level,” he continues. “You become very aware of networks and what a complex tapestry it is.”

Nature Meets the Unconscious Mind

But what is that “different cognitive experience” so many seek in a garden? “When you’re out gardening,” Huttinger says, “whether you’re alone or working with a group, there is sort of a transcendental nature to it. You’re communing with the earth. I’m a materialist, so I don’t read a lot of metaphysical stuff into it, but I do kind of feel there’s a direct connection.”

The concept of gardens as cognitive spaces to which we escape resonates throughout The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden which collects Stanley Kunitz’s thoughts on poetry, gardens, and creativity through conversations recorded by poet and interdisciplinary artist Genine Lentine, shortly before Kunitz’s death in 2006. Kunitz gardened and wrote poetry right up to the ripe old age of 99.

Like so many pastoral poets before him, Kunitz observed that in gardens, the human and the wild converge. And wilderness, with its fluid, organic forms and fungal networks, with its writhing biota of compost, its patterns of seed, root, and rhizome dispersal, is akin to the unconscious, he says. “It resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes. I’ve always felt, even as a child, that there was the decorum of the social structure, the family structure, and so forth, and then there was the wild permissiveness of the inner life. I learned I could go anywhere in my inner life.”

This unconscious that Kunitz equates with wilderness is the source of poetry, but “there’s no formula for accessing the unconscious. The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you … It learns you are a friendly host,” he says. In cultivating that relationship, we learn to tap our unconscious selves “in a way that is distinct from the ordinary, the customary use of the mind in daily life. You’re somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unknown.”

I love this analogy, evocative of a pollinator-friendly garden that invites the wild to your door. I thought of it when I finished Reeves’s collection, The Gardener and the Garden, and read the last stanzas of its final poem, “Everything moves into and out of the world.”

What will carry me
into the next
breath if not this bit of land,
where what can
no longer come to me
in dreams can still
emerge from earth
and flower?

Go Native!

The Butterfly Effect

The Learning Garden

America’s Greenest Zoo Grows Plants and Minds

Growing Weed