Gardens of Longing

 

Late in February gardens (at least in California) began showing new growth, and green sprouts, and our wonderful local Catamaran Literary Reader published a celebration of gardens of all sorts—Catamaran Vol. 13, 1: Special Garden Edition, 2025, Issue 47—

"In our Special Garden edition, we invite you to enter our pages consisting of literary works with settings that span from public gardens to imaginary gardens, themes of flowers, plants, and the organic world, in a narrative accompanied by a range of visual artworks exploring gardens from landscape and still life paintings to abstraction and realism." 

 

In my creative nonfiction meditation included in this special collection, "Gardens of Longing:  A Memoir in Stolen Cuttings, Hoarded Seeds," I hope I show how the gardens we plant for ourselves are a hopeful, wistful, always nostalgic mingling of longing and belonging, comprising the places and their essences we’ve lost, or on various journeys found.

 

"I cultivate a garden of stolen plants, the way the words of poems and stories in my rag-tag notebooks also make me what I want to be.  Cultivate, I see, comes from colere—also meaning inhabit.  Like sea creatures which inhabit others’ shells I borrow and then live inside a casing of inspiriting plants and trees for dapple and for shade, and tuck old worn stone figures among them, companions of my muse. This thieving reprehensible, perhaps, but something I can’t help.  It’s essential to who I am, and the telling of that.  I acquire plants the same way I buy books:  believing each will give me finally exactly what I long for.  My belonging and my home."

 

Here, in my always ephemeral garden in Santa Cruz, I find

". . . the salvias and herbs and weathered stone, upstart yarrow, geraniums in every shade of pink, a little St. Jerome with his lion and book—all [these] elements assure me that this, my seat under the lichened pine with just a scrap of ocean view, a passing dog, a junco searching through the tangled grass, and all those cherished scraps of other times, elsewhere, is exactly where I belong."

 

I'm honored to have this rumination featured on the Catamaran website, and it can be found here.

 

 

 

image:   Andrea Johnson, cover artist