Today I have the honour and pleasure of sharing an article from Julia Williams, Author of The Summer Season
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| Photos courtesey of the Author |
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- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Avon (23 Jun 2011)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1847560881
- ISBN-13: 978-1847560889
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Gardening, writing and the creative process
Like a lot of authors I know, I am a keen (amateur) gardener. I'm not quite sure where my passion was born, as I grew up in London with a little scrubby patch of suburban grass, but I do remember my mother giving me sweet pea seeds once and trying to grow them in a pattern. I failed dismally in my pattern making, but the excitement of seeing seeds I planted transforming into flowers certainly was something I can recall feeling as being very special.
Scroll on twenty years, and I had my first ever home, and suddenly I had a little cottage garden to play with. There weren’t quite roses round the door, and we had to relay lawns, repave paths, and dig over the flowerbeds, but I quickly derived great pleasure from seeing daffodils and crocuses pop up in March, and accidentally discovering that marigolds reseed and come up every year granting brightness to the dullest patch. We had a wall which we whitewashed with a trough attached to it, in which I planted honeysuckle, geraniums, petunias, busy lizzies, lobelia and alyssum without any clear notion of what I was doing. It was thanks to my green fingered father in law that I learnt how to prick out seedlings, and take cuttings. He also gave me cotoneaster bushes which are great for encouraging bees, and tall purple irises from his own magnificent garden.
When we moved into our current home, the house itself was in a huge state of disrepair, but the garden had such potential, I fell in love immediately. It’s taken us along time to tame it, but we now have space to grow our own vegetables (something I would never have thought of before), while still managing to keep the flowers simple with pots and hanging baskets on the patio. This year, the weather being so good in early spring, I also managed to dig over a rough patch that has always been full of weeds and plant a few gladioli, irises and sweet peas. We’ve worked hard on the garden this year, and now it’s all coming into splendid fruition, something I find immensely satisfying.
I mention all this because my latest book, The Summer Season has a gardening theme. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about gardening – my first novel, Pastures New was set around some allotments – but I’ve returned to it, because I think it is particularly apposite for romantic fiction. The seasonal cycle of growth, death and rebirth is perfect as a background to stories of love, loss and renewal. When I was first thinking about The Summer Season, I wanted to write about characters who had all suffered a loss of some kind, and use the restoration of a garden as a means of them finding love again. As I thought about it more, and talked to my editor I came to the conclusion I should also be writing about how the garden was created, and why it fell into disrepair. So I’ve woven a modern story with a story from the past, in which the original owner of the garden (Edward Handford) created a knot garden as a wedding present for his wife (Lily) . I chose a knot garden (perhaps that early sweet pea planting was a source of inspiration!) because I loved the idea of Edward creating a garden out of love which would have special meaning for the pair of them. And once I got going I started to research the meaning of flowers, which gave an added depth to the garden. I had a wonderful time, choosing flowers which had significance to the characters in the book, and it’s made me look at plants in a completely different way since.
As well as providing inspiration, I find that gardening is also very conducive to writing. Unlike a lot of activities I do (running, walking, swimming), I don’t find that I can work out plotlines in the garden, or think about what I'm going to write about next. In fact, if anything, gardening is the only activity I do where my mind goes completely blank, and I don’t think at all. About anything. And for someone who spends her time, thinking and worrying about stuff far too much, it brings me a blessed respite from the frantic activity which normally goes on in my brain. This might not seem like it helps with writing, but it really really does.
As I mentioned, thanks to our fabulously warm spring this year, I was able to get out in the garden a lot in March, and spent days digging over the vegetable patch, and thinking of nothing in particular. I had just finished the second draft of The Summer Season, and it had been a huge effort, as I found it really tricky weaving together the two separate threads of the story. I was completely brain dead and drained after the effort it took, and totally depleted imaginatively. I often feel very guilty about being out in the garden in the week, because I have so many other more pressing things to do. But for that one glorious week, I couldn’t do anything on the book, because I was waiting for the next round of rewrites, I was miraculously up to date with the housework, and the sun was shining. It seemed criminal to be inside, so I out I went and beavered away to my heart’s content. When I expressed my concern that I was playing hookey to my agent, she very wisely commented that I needed time to recharge my batteries. And do you know she was absolutely right.
During that week, when the sun shone, I dug over soil, and even managed to get a tan, I found myself noticing nature with a vividness I cannot recall before. I think mainly because the weather isn’t usually so good in March, so I'm not out in the garden, but this year, I was aware of every bud bursting from a bush, every daffodil popping out its head, and for the first time in my life I really heard the many different kinds of birdsong in my garden. When, a couple of weeks later, I got the final round of rewrites, I was able to write about spring with a renewed sense of what it is actually like to be out there, that close to nature, and I hope I’ve conveyed something of that in the book.
Not only that, since I’ve finished The Summer Season, I’ve been on a real buzz creatively and have come up with lots of different ideas for new projects. Gardening isn’t just good for the soul, it’s pretty effective for getting the old creative juices going too.
For the time being though, I’ve finished with gardening as theme, as my next project is to return to the world I created Last Christmas, and find out what my characters have been up to in the interim. But I have no doubt, when another idea strikes, I shall come back to my roots. After all, gardening is fertile territory for a writer…
The Summer Season is available now
I reviewed the novel here
Find out more about Julia Williams on her blog here
