One of the ways I shake words loose is to go for a walk. By myself. With a pen and pad in my pocket. Along a country road taking me under trees, around bends, beside brooks, up and down hills, and alongside green fields.

The rhythm of putting one foot in front of another has a way of loosening thoughts from the depths of the mind. It's a matter of slowing the mind down to the pace of footsteps and distracting it from a to-do list.

Now in high summer the white Queen Anne's lace and blue Bachelor buttons are abundantly blooming in patches of sun along the roads, but every month in New England brings different blossoms and foliage.

Walking and thinking is an ancient practice. It was originally noted by a Greek philosopher, then written down in Latin as solivitur ambulando,meaning "it will be solved by walking." Many American writers have walked and written about its benefits, notably Henry David Thoreau in Walking (1861).

I almost always return from a walk feeling a little lighter, mentally as well as bodily, and with a pocket full of scrawled notes.  Read More 

Four Tenths of an Acre is a book I wrote out of, well, guilt. After moving from the city to the country, I spent many afternoons gardening in the yard behind my house instead of working on the biography I was supposed to be writing.

This gardening memoir grew, ironically, out of all those afternoons of not writing.

It was a time when I saw everything through a gardener's green glasses. As I taught myself how to grow perennials, I took detailed notes in one garden notebook after another about planting, weeding, deadheading, watering, and all the rest. Before long I had filled many notebooks, and I realized I had the makings of a book.

I am gratified that more than 700 readers tossed their hats into the ring for a chance to win a copy of the book during the recent Goodreads Giveaway, and I've been busy during the past few weeks sending books out to the two dozen winners.  Read More 

 
Driving home yesterday from a class reunion at the girls' boarding school I described in Westover: Giving Girls A Place of Their Own, I felt a sense of gratitude. It was where, as a teenager, I was able to daydream about the life I wanted to live, and by graduation I wanted it to be a writing life.

I had taken an inspiring elective called Creative Writing during my junior year, and before long what I was writing--mostly descriptive nonfiction--was being published in the school's literary magazine, named The Lantern for the light of learning, and I was seeing my first bylines.

The heart of the school is still a large lofty room decorated in crimson called Red Hall. It looks out into a courtyard, which is enclosed by a beautiful old quadrangle, and where apple trees are hung with lanterns decorated with ribbons in the spring. Read More 

The history of writers who garden is long because writing and gardening, well, have a way of fertilizing each other.

The list of gardening writers and writing gardeners is long: Nathanial Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and others too numerous to name.

After getting dirty digging a hole or bloody from pruning a rose, I find that it's a relief to spend the next morning writing in my office. And after hours of mental intensity while working on my memoir, it's an exhilarating release to get into the garden.

When a morning of motionlessness overworking my brain is balanced by an afternoon of mental ease and bodily motion, I feel nourished and happily exhausted.

Gardening keeps me writing, and writing keeps me gardening.  Read More