The Passionate Gardener by Des Kennedy

Author:Des Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: GAR000000
ISBN: 9781926685489
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2009-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Passionate Plantings

NOT LONG AGO I turned my attention to writing a novel—an undertaking that consumes one’s focus as relentlessly as the most feverish days in the garden—and saw it duly published with the title Flame of Separation. Setting modesty aside for a moment, I can tell you that this was a work of penetrating psychological insight and profound metaphysical speculation. Prior to its publication by an esteemed but penurious small press, I had pitched the story to a once-reputable Toronto publishing house and received in reply a brief letter advising me that “we never publish books involving paranormal phenomena, but we’d be delighted if you would consider writing for us a funny book about dogs.” (Needless to say, I’m hard at work on that very project at the moment.) Following its publication, my paranormal novel was greeted with a glowing review in one newspaper, which included the heartening comment that “although Kennedy has been a fixture on the British Columbia writing scene for more than a decade, nothing in his previous writing has hinted at the power and grace he exhibits here.”

Many hazards beset the poor but honest writer, scribbling long into the night in a gloomy room in the seediest imaginable neighborhood, unrecognized by an uncaring public and preyed upon by book reviewers, literary critics, publishers, editors, sales and marketing bean counters, literary agents, publicists, academic nitpickers, and assorted party animals. It is an impossible, preposterous way of life, a form of masochism so deviant that we must wonder why any individual chooses to pursue it.

But spare your tears, I beseech you, for the downtrodden wordsmith. The indignities of the publishing industry are as nothing, mere froth and effervescence, compared with the hazards of the gardening life and the pit of depravity into which that life can plunge its victims. That sounds extreme, I know. In a world racked with natural disaster, premeditated terror, and random violence, the notion of any significant imperilment inherent in horticulture seems a facile conceit. We are, after all, beguiled into imagining that the gardening life is an innocent walk through marvelous pleasure grounds, a stroll through attractive surroundings in which refined persons are engaged in sketching, reading, and reflective contemplation. Little children gambol on the lawn, and miniature dogs skip merrily at leash. All is serene and tasteful, everything in good order. There is nothing to unduly excite, nothing to confound, nothing to dismay. Gardening literature through the ages is rife with this sort of fiction: Old Francis Bacon writing that gardening is “the purest of humane pleasures.” Or John Evelyn writing in the 1600s that “gardening is a labor full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health, and longevity.”

However, how many gardeners do you know who spend even a fraction of their days reclining on the grass, reading lyric poetry, or sketching fetching blooms? They’re far more apt to be tortured by the agonies of garden design, the mental contortions of trying to get the color schemes right.

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