{"id":11399,"date":"2025-03-25T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T11:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11399"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:16:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:16:36","slug":"like-to-write-just-dig-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11399","title":{"rendered":"Like to Write? Just Dig In!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Looking through my stack of old Martha Stewart Living<\/em> magazines (guilty pleasure), I\u2019ve 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 \u201cthe writer\u2019s garden.\u201d I don\u2019t know how Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay found the time\u2014maybe your name has to start with \u201cE\u201d\u2014but their gardens were lovely. Getting away from the desk and doing something totally different, that\u2019s interesting but doesn\u2019t require 110 percent of your mind, nourishes creativity, I\u2019ve found. Fresh air helps too. At least that\u2019s what these writers seem to have learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edith Wharton\u2019s tilled the soil in the Berkshires and said \u201cDecidedly, I\u2019m a better landscape gardener than novelist.\u201d 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>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A little less constrained, perhaps, are and were Edna St. Vincent Millay\u2019s gardens in Austerlitz, N.Y., where she once hosted what Living<\/em> called \u201cBacchanalian parties.\u201d 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 \u201cshack\u201d tax deductible?, I wonder. Her large estate, Steepletop, is open to the public. Website here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Jackson, Mississippi, you\u2019ll find Eudora Welty\u2019s hom<\/a>e and the beautiful garden her mother originally planted and her lifelong connection to it shows up in her work. Welty, says the garden website, \u201cmentions 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 \u201cparade of bloom,\u201d including many roses, I found a photo that features my favorite, irises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking through my stack of old Martha Stewart Living magazines (guilty pleasure), I\u2019ve 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,1911],"tags":[2271,2270,2272,2269],"class_list":["post-11399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-nature","tag-edith-wharton","tag-edna-st-vincent-millay","tag-elizabeth-lawrence","tag-eudora-welty"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2XR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11402,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11399\/revisions\/11402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}