‘Without being able to garden or walk or swim, I don’t really know how to write’

In the morning, I sit with a cup of tea by a window where the sun streams in and, more often than not, stare at my herb garden. All the rain means the plants are going gangbusters and it’s surprising to me how much pleasure I get from this. On some days, if I stare hard enough, I convince myself I can see the parsley, the sorrel, the basil, the coriander and the dill growing. (This may not, objectively speaking, be true.)

Writing about landscapes can be challenging as changes occur over time.Credit: Getty Images

I’ve never had my own garden before. Well, not like this. Not one where I’ve planted things that actually grew. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that I have occasionally volunteered to work in public gardens (on Alcatraz, at Abbotsford Convent) but, as COVID-19 kept us Melbourne folk locked in and closer to home, it became important to have not a room, but a garden of my own.

The truth is that without being able to garden or walk or swim, I don’t really know how to write. Doing these things has become a kind of meditation that allows my brain to work away without me forcing it. I’ve always assumed that this form of meditation wasn’t so much about stillness as about movement. The physical rhythms of the body work their way into my brain, turn into words, then string themselves into sentences.

It sometimes surprises me that the natural world continues to be so essential to my process because – I have to be honest – writing about the landscapes I spend time in, about nature, is an increasingly challenging business.

I walked the South Downs Way back in 2007. It’s a beautiful, ancient, long-distance foot – and hoof – path that runs along the South Downs in southern England. You have right of way through fields and walk on public paths, up and down more hills than I care to remember. The vivid green of its heights were dotted with clumps of beech, oak and yew, atop dazzling white, undulating chalk. You moved through what feels like oceans of golden canola. Spring lambs frolicked. Birds hopped through hedgerows. I walked to Lewes where the people I was researching had lived, then died. Finally, I walked up and over the chalk cliffs that make up the Seven Sisters, then around Beachy Head to Eastbourne. The escarpment stretches some 160 kilometres.

Ten years later, I wrote a series of scenes for my novel, This Devastating Fever, based on that walk and that was when the thought occurred to me: might the Downs have changed since the early 20th century, the period I was writing about? In fact, how much had the landscape changed in the few years since I’d walked it in 2007?

The truth is that without being able to garden or walk or swim, I don’t really know how to write.

I did some research. The earliest settlements through the Downs dated back 5000 years to the Iron Age. But while the South Downs could have been described as a landscape that was relatively static, WWII became a catalyst for change. Fortifications were built, agricultural methods changed and crops became more homogenous (all that golden canola …). Pesticides became the norm.

My novel is based on the life of Leonard Woolf, and Woolf campaigned to make the South Downs a national park during the 1930s. It finally became one in 2010, three years after I did my walk and 41 years after he died. As for all those crickets and birds I heard, well, it seemed that in the decade between my walking the Downs and revisiting them fictionally, birds, insects and many other creatures were in a precipitous decline.

If writing about a place based on a decade-old impression seems a stretch, writing realistically about it as it might have been a hundred years ago is even more of a fool’s errand. It became clear to me that there was no walking back in time to the landscape that the South Downs once was. This understanding helped me clarify the dilemma I was having when it came to writing the novel in the first place: how do we write authentically about historical events? How do we write about change?

Perhaps in response to this, I found I became less interested in official histories and more interested in trying to bring to life minutiae of my characters’ experience in the natural world. How bright were the stars (then, now), how loud the crickets (then, now), how robust the wild life (then, now)? How often did my characters prune their apple trees? What vegetables did they plant in the garden at different times of year? And did they have a herb garden they could sit by in the sun of a morning, a garden that filled them with joy?

Sophie Cunningham’s novel, This Devastating Fever (Hardie Grant; $33), was published in September.

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