Looking through my stack of old Martha Stewart Living magazines (guilty pleasure), I’ve found some gems. Not just tempting cocktail recipes (try the bourbon-Canton ginger liqueur-splash of lemon juice and garnished with star anise at the holidays), but also a lovely article on “the writer’s garden.” I don’t know how Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay found the time—maybe your name has to start with “E”—but their gardens were lovely. Getting away from the desk and doing something totally different, that’s interesting but doesn’t require 110 percent of your mind, nourishes creativity, I’ve found. Fresh air helps too. At least that’s what these writers seem to have learned.

Edith Wharton’s tilled the soil in the Berkshires and said “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist.” Her home in Lenox, Mass., is now a National Historic Landmark, and you can visit, see all she did to develop its three acres of formal gardens, and go back to your B&B for a nap. Pictures at the website.

A little less constrained, perhaps, are and were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s gardens in Austerlitz, N.Y., where she once hosted what Living called “Bacchanalian parties.” The poet worked hours each day in a writing shack she built in a pine grove, which she planed. In her case the gardens definitely nourished creativity. Was the “shack” tax deductible?, I wonder. Her large estate, Steepletop, is open to the public. Website here.

In Jackson, Mississippi, you’ll find Eudora Welty’s home and the beautiful garden her mother originally planted and her lifelong connection to it shows up in her work. Welty, says the garden website, “mentions more than 150 kinds of plants in her stories, and the garden includes many examples of her favorite flowers, camellias. Although the carefully selected plants create a year-long “parade of bloom,” including many roses, I found a photo that features my favorite, irises.