Putting down roots

JUST as you can glean an insight into a person's psyche, in all its ugliness or beauty, in an unguarded moment with a dog, a person's attitude to a garden is like a door flying open into who they really are.

In his new book Philosophy in the Garden, Damon Young looks at 11 writers and their response to tamed nature. And so the author of Emma or 1984 or A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is flared beautifully into being through their communion with the earth and its riches. It's a book you devour with your head nodding, because there's a humbling humanity in the relationship between those titans of the written word and their little plots of green.

Take Virginia Woolf. Her last diary entry before committing suicide: "L. is doing the rhododendrons." There's something so moving about that, a woman looking out for her husband, knowing that life will go on in all its order and quietness; and that solace and connection will be drawn from that. Leonard was a writer too and the couple had a steady rhythm of work, garden, work; both needing that circuit-breaker of earth and air after the desk's intensity. What did he do after her body was discovered, three weeks later, in the River Ouse? Garden, the next day, for the entire day.

I draw solace from our own patch of earth. We've not been in this house a full year but the soil's slowly releasing its secrets. Exuberant little cackles here, and here, and over there, unfolding week after week, so thoughtfully planted by unknown hands. The thrilling pageantry of it! And gratitude towards the person who once loved this garden so much. Their legacy, a symphony of wonder. Two shy white camellia bushes tucked in a corner. Heady jasmine blaring the arrival of summer. A cascade of sudden bougainvillea. Blousy hibiscus. Bullying bamboo. The insistent ceremony of the snails after rain. The first, thrilling, gardenia. A puckish West Australian flowering gum. We'll quieten you, it all seems to be saying - astonish, delight, smile you up.

I needed this earth. Had lived apartment-high in my twenties and felt tetchily too far from soil and trees, the singing green. At one stage lived in a tiny mews house and drew endless delight from two crammed window boxes out the front, our sole patch of green, tending them as lovingly as babies.

We planted a coltish silvery gum amidst the robust British shrubs in every back garden we had there. But it was never enough. As we age, don't we experience an inexorable drawing towards nature - a desire to enfold ourselves back into the sights and smells of our own childhoods, when we lived closer to the sky and the earth? The anaesthesia of the known: that's what the modern exile often escapes from. Yet there may come a point where they want to reconcile with the known. Corrosively.

And now, a cascade of childhood green that's incalculably restorative. Amid it, creativity is unfolding strong. "The same household routines and daily walks in the garden ... the same sounds and silences, all these samenesses made a secure environment in which her imagination could work," said biographer Claire Tomalin of Jane Austen.

Damon Young writes of passionate gardener Emily Dickinson and her wonderfully apt description of her poems: "Blossoms in the brain." The last words of George Orwell's domestic diary as he lay in bed, lungs bleeding: "Snowdrops all over the place. A few tulips showing. Some wallflowers still trying to flower." Because as we near death there can be a softening to wonder as we note the astonishing beauty and resilience of the natural world, are moved in a way we're not when younger. It's the great, endless turning of the plants - all those little miracles of creation, stoicism, obedience - and they'll still be there, presumably, long after we're gone.

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Nikki's new book of columns and essays, Honestly (Fourth Estate, $19.99), is out now.