Gardeners & Editors Are Quite Alike
How one editor found inspiration in his grandfather’s garden to work with novice writers
Lord Buckley, an oftentimes overlooked comedian from the 1950s, would usually end his live performances by addressing his audience with the following words: “The flowers, the beautiful, mystic, multi-colored flowers are not the flowers of life, but people. People are the true flowers of life. And it has been the most refreshing pleasure for me to have temporarily strolled in the garden of your attention.” I love that quote, but I — and maybe other academic language fanatics reading this — have to call out Lord Buckley on how vague his words are.
Looking for the specificity of words could mislead
When I learned about the power of the specificity of language, from academic writing that is, I immediately began examining all texts through the prism of this new knowledge. When the words were precise, it was glorious; and when they weren’t, disappointing. And that’s how I felt when I reread Lord Buckley’s flowers quote somewhere on the Internet. I felt ashamed to have been transfixed by a remark so deceptively beautiful yet so unclear.
What kind of flowers did Lord Buckley mean: chrysanthemums, lilies, anemones, roses, buttercups, marigolds, snowdrops?
Also, which people did he refer to? All of them? Surely not all people are “beautiful” or “mystic” as flowers; think of child molesters, rapists, murderers, and street promoters.
And I’ve always had open contempt for the word “life.” Does he mean life like the process of living, or the span of years between birth and death, or a certain “life” style? For some time, the quote remained veiled in a mist of unanswered questions.
I encountered Lord Buckley’s quote again recently, and I noticed that my disappointment with it was actually my own fault. I had all along focused on the wrong part of it when I should’ve contemplated over “most refreshing pleasure for me to have temporarily strolled in the garden of your attention.”
The glorious specificity of that sentence allowed me to understand the meaning of the entire quote and appreciate the Student Anthology (a literary journal created by students to publish other students’ writing, with the hope to inspire them to venture into fiction and poetry) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and my grandfather a bit more.
The sentence, even before being applied to Student Anthologies or grandfathers, is worth examining as it is. Lord Buckley expresses his absolute appreciation to have performed live for the audience in front of him.
In fact, his approach to his act on stage is not that of a tiring job, but that of a “refreshing pleasure.” He doesn’t refer to his actions as a “routine” or “performance” or “show” but instead calls it a “temporary stroll.” A “stroll” is a specific kind of leisure walk: an unburdened wander with no particular end goal.
The best part of the quote is the exact place he “strolled.” Academic writing helps us out here: English is an end-weight language and the most important information goes at the end of a sentence.
It’s really like a funnel: the words, in the beginning, are we can attach broader and more meaning to them, but the further you read, the narrower, more intense, and specific they become. Lord Buckley was saving the best for last. “The garden of your attention” is the key phrase to understanding the quote.
A garden for writers
Instead of “garden,” Lord Buckley could have said “meadow,” after all meadows have flowers, too. But gardens, unlike meadows, are manmade, orderly, civilized. So, following his comparison of people being like flowers, Lord Buckley asserts that to grow, people need a garden and not any garden, but one of “attention,” a garden ready to communicate. Flowers have beautiful colors and mystic scents, and that makes them unique, but people can “lend their ears.”
Then those flowers are not there just to be beautiful but also to talk, listen and exchange ideas and emotions. And there is no more “refreshing pleasure” than an attentive audience for someone like Lord Buckley, an artist.
And there’s nothing better than that for someone like me, an editor in the Goethe University Student Anthology and someone who likes to apply cool quotes like Lord Buckley’s to actual events from his “life” (the period between birth and death).
The Student Anthology is a magazine that gives English literature students a voice, and that, hopefully, encourages them to continue writing and creating stories. A pretty important institution within an institution. If your English department has no magazine, is it even an English department?
That is how I saw the entire operation in the beginning, pretty straightforward yet also romantic. But now, almost a full year later, I see the Student Anthology as a “garden,” not so straightforward and even more romantic.
That romanticism holds a new value I have put into the magazine and my work in it: now that it’s no longer just a student publication but a garden, I, as an editor, understand the importance of nurturing the flowers in the garden. And unlike Lord Buckley, I know who the people I am referring to are: the young Goethe University writers are the flowers in the Anthology garden.
Yes, flowers don’t specifically need a garden to grow. You can even say that there is a certain romance to flowers that grow in the wilderness; flora that was never touched by a human hand is most picturesque in its natural setting.
Sure. But remember that people, in our case aspiring writers, need a garden to prosper and grow. Otherwise, the wind might blow their colors away, the hailstorm might crush them, and the tourist might pluck them from the soil.
That is the primary purpose of gardens, where the flowers not only grow safely and peacefully but also, in their togetherness, form a serene and colorful state of sentience. And that is the idea behind any student magazine: to collect, nourish and display to the world the beauty of young writers’ words.
But gardens and student publications don’t just pop up from thin air. Both gardens and magazines need someone to create, protect and attend to their wellbeing.
The editor as a gardener
An old gardener teaches a young editor how to appreciate the natural beauty of his craft
In the garden, it is the gardener who does all that; in the Anthology, it is the editor. The editor is the gardener in the garden of writers. The editor, just like the gardener, makes sure that the flowers in his garden remain as natural as possible but also accessible to people who have decided to “temporarily stroll” among them.
In practice, it is the duty of the editor to work with a text in such a way that it remains in the author’s original voice but also be readable and pleasant for the reader. That is no easy task, as I have learned. The editor has to cautiously emphasize the beautiful colors of a text and simultaneously weed out the unhealthy words without hindering the organic whole. The gardener works in favor of his flowers. The editor works in favor of his writers. But why would the gardener and editor do that?
Despite all the talk of gardens, I’m no gardener. My hands are soft, I hate the sun, and flowers make me sneeze. My grandfather, however, doesn’t have those problems.
He is 82, retired, estranged, and devoted to the garden surrounding the house in which he was born. Deep in the heartland of the Bulgarian countryside lies his crooked old cottage with a rickety roof, whitewashed walls, and screeching floorboards. His father built it in 1908 and it smells like 1908.
But seldom do people examine it that closely because the first thing they notice when they enter the yard is the garden: walnut and almond trees form an arc over the front gate, the cherry, apricot, apple, and pear trees line up like soldiers on the left-hand side, then there is the grapevine tunnel with both white and red grapes hanging low and heavy; raspberry, strawberry, blackberry bushes are scattered randomly around the pathway. Behind the house grow the tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, peppermint, and a tiny patch of lavender. In the middle of the garden, by the old well, of course, is grandpa’s crown jewel, the tall white rose bushes.
He grows all that by himself, and if you see the physical might he cuts the roots of rotten trees with, you might think that the thick glasses, white receding hair, and the wrinkles are just a disguise and that it’s actually a younger man swinging the ax.
He goes there early in the morning every other day to do all the odd jobs the time of year requires him to do: gather the fruit, water the soil, cut dry branches, make his own wine and schnapps. A peculiar extreme he goes is to sometimes hum tunes to them. Like they are children before bedtime. He also spends most of his pension on his flora.
Why would he invest money, energy, and time (neither of which he has much left) into something as uncertain as a garden?
All it takes is either a spring hailstorm or a summer drought to level all his labor to the bare ground. In fact, I’ve seen his garden ruined by hailstorms and draughts. But he’d always go back and repair everything from the ground up.
No complaints, no moaning or groaning.
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why. Why wouldn’t an old grandfather like him simply stay home and do what other old grandfathers do: take walks with his hands behind his back, watch football on TV all day, and play chess in the park? Why is that garden so important to him? Why does he choose to keep going back there?
Why my grandfather keeps on gardening and why I keep on editing
I came up with several hypotheses.
One could be an existential reason, but he’s a worker to his bone marrow; he’s never gone deep into philosophical predicaments. Another one could be the product, but he usually gives all of it away, either to neighbors or friends or to my father.
Maybe he’s trying to fit himself into a long family tradition of people who mended the same garden; maybe he just feels nostalgic about his childhood, which he spent in that same house and garden, watching his parents and grandparents plant the seeds of his old-age joy.
That seemed the most logical answer. So, after the most recent devastating storm that took down an almond tree and bruised a couple of bushes, I asked him:
“Are you going back?”
“What else can I do?”
“Go out on walks with your hands behind your back or watch football on TV or play chess in the park. Leave that old garden.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m still alive,” he said without missing a beat. It was never about him. Suddenly, his humming to the plants didn’t seem odd at all. He does it out of pure love for gardening and working with flora and soil, in the silent summer sun under his bleached-out 90s Nike cap.
And if the hailstorm crushes the apricots and apples and almonds, he’ll start over. And if the drought withers the berries and basil and roses, he’ll start over.
He has established a connection with that garden, something no one from the family has, and values it to a fault. It is either madness or that bygone virtue of selflessness. I like to think it’s the latter.
I doubt my grandfather will ever understand the concept behind the Anthology, so I can’t really thank him for his dedication that helped me understand the nature of my university’s student magazine. As I so idealistically compared it to a garden, the editors to gardeners, I cannot but say that there is only one reason for the entire thing to work: the writer flowers. Without it, writers like you will never be heard, let alone forgotten.
