Gardens and Death

importance of feelings of self-worth in old age, too: “One wheelbarrow can outlast a life and, in some cases, feel more useful.” In this line of thought, Becca R. Levy has extensively explored the cognitive and physical effects of ageing self-stereotypes. Her findings show “the importance of self-relevance to the operation of self-stereotypes,”

which in Levy’s experiments – to provide an example – resulted in the fact that “older participants exposed to the positive age-stereotype primes outperformed those exposed to the negative age-stereotype primes on the memory tasks” (“Mind” 207). Such an internalised ageism does not seem to be shared by the older woman in the poem, who despite being no longer agile keeps tending her garden with the aid of the wheelbarrow.

Therefore, the older woman in the poem is depicted as having a strong connection to her garden. In turn, her persistence in taking care of it offers a vision of resilience in old age.

The fact that the woman persuades the wheelbarrow – while at the same time motivating herself – to keep going by “coax[ing]” it with beautiful names in order to reach “Past the late summer flowers to the vegetable patch,” indicates that she is enthusiastic about gardening. The old persona’s resilience and active attitude are likely to result from her work in the garden, in accord with the many health benefits that horticultural therapy grants to gardening. For instance, the medical team in charge of Kheng Siang Ted Ng et al.’s study on a horticultural therapy intervention group concluded that “HT [horticultural therapy] could potentially be useful for reducing inflammation and protecting neuronal functions in healthy elderly adults” (11).

Elegy?” In this line, healing garden research argues that both healing gardens and nature in general contribute towards a healthy elaboration of grief. According to Stigsdotter and Grahn, one of the theories that are at the base of the healing garden school is that

“[a] person stricken with a trauma like grief or personal illness needs an environment as well as relations that make less heavy demands” (“What” 62). In this sense, plants and natural elements demand very little as compared to people or animals. Moreover, both greenery and natural elements in either natural settings or designed outdoor spaces become healing agents for those undergoing psychological distress such as grief, in “their stimulating yet soothing qualities of ‘difference within sameness’ (moving water, breezes in vegetation, visual scanning)” (Cooper-Marcus and Barnes 8).

Among those poems by Crozier that connect death to the garden trope, “Rebirth”

(1976) ponders about the persona’s own future death. It is the penultimate poem in the collection Inside Is the Sky, which was Crozier’s first poetry collection and, as such, set many of the themes that would later be developed in her subsequent oeuvre. The topic of death – both of animals and of people – is recurrent in this collection, among other major themes such as the relevance of poetry for the persona, the harsh weather conditions, especially on the prairies, nature in its interrelationship with the persona and her lover, cruelty with animals, the mother figure and the grandfather figure, falling in love, and the end of love. Interestingly enough, many poems have a pair in this collection in terms of poems that are thematically related to each other or respond to each other. These thematic pair poems are sometimes printed together, though not always. As regards “Rebirth,” its thematic pair is the poem “Burial,” which precedes “Rebirth” in the collection although they are not printed consecutively. In “Burial” the speaker demands to be buried in contact with the ground, wrapped in plant leaves and in a place where she can hear the birds tweeting:

Will you place me in a bottomless coffin

my back crossed by ropes of grass . . .

Will you wrap me in green foxtails . . .

Will you leave the coffin on the hillside where blackbirds trill in wireless skies red markers bright

on hot wings? (ll. 1-3, 7-8, 11-14)

On the other hand, in “Rebirth” the persona focuses on the garden plants that may grow from her decomposed human corpse after burial. Thus, it suggests that while the human in the poem, who can metonymically stand for humanity, may die, the Earth will keep alive: “And what shall grow from my body / when I am buried in darkness? / And what shall strive for the light” (ll. 1-3). “Rebirth” becomes a reflection on death, which fosters the persona’s self-examination of her personality traits in a life review process of sorts.

The persona discards roses, lilies, or crocuses as possibly ever growing out of her dead body, in the persona’s association of the flowers with personality traits she does not identify with. The speaker believes that the best option is for her putrid flesh to become a weed, which is not dazzling or fragrant, but “just green” (l. 17). The poem can thus be said to be about the life cycle; that is, about death and new life. On the one hand, the persona seems to undermine herself by means of both choosing the least attractive of all plants, and by defining herself by means of negatives: “Not a rose / for I am not soft, not gentle / Not a lily / for I am not pure, not smooth” (ll. 5-8). However, the adjectives the persona does not identify with are the ones that have traditionally defined the ideal

personality traits of white, middle and upper-class women, namely, delicacy, fragility (Young 77), tenderness and purity. As Simone de Beauvoir explained in her ground- breaking, feminist work, The Second Sex, traditional understandings of femininity in the nineteenth century – such as those posited by French philosopher Auguste Comte – regarded woman as a “purely affective being [whose role was] that of spouse and housewife” (160). Therefore, from a feminist stance, the poem suggests that the female persona rebels against such patriarchal ideals of womanhood which understand women as passive objects of beauty, with a role often compared to that of decorative flowers – as the rose, the lily and the crocus mentioned in the poem. On the other hand, if read from an ecocritical viewpoint, weeds are as necessary for the health of ecosystems as any other plant. Actually, the persona remarks on the importance of the green colour of the weed, in the sense that she does not need anything else but to metamorphose into any plant – and thus embody it – in order to experience nature at its fullest: “to feel the hot wind / the dry sun / the sharp stab of insects” (ll. 18-20). The nature that is presented in this poem is not that of a beautified pastoral poem, but one that mirrors reality. As such, in the last two lines of the poem, the persona realizes how swiftly her life as a weed is going to end: “the careless cut / of the gardener’s hoe” (ll. 21-22). In this regard, Boyd contends that “[a]s figures of control and destruction, the two gardeners in both poems [namely “Rebirth”

and “Backyard Eden”] are unreflective and heedless,” which Boyd argues is a strategy to

“disturb readers through an ironic refusal to fulfil the expectations of beauty, paradise, and renewal signalled by the titles” (298). The metaphorical value granted to the figure of the gardener in Crozier’s first collections works to destabilize gender constructs, and as such does not often reflect the positive associations of the gardener/poet that can be observed in later collections, as Boyd also suggests (300). An exception is “Potato Planters” (1988), in which the father figure tends the garden with his family and promotes

family co-operation and well-being, as explained above.

As regards reflections on death of parents in connection with the garden trope, both “The Gardens Within Us” (1992) and “A Good Day to Start a Journal” (1995) are relevant. “The Gardens Within Us” focuses on the adult persona’s coping with the terminal illness and expected future loss of her older father, while in “A Good Day to Start a Journal” the female persona remembers her deceased mother-in-law with sadness, as commented on above. “The Gardens Within Us” belongs to the third section within the collection Inventing the Hawk, which is also entitled “The Gardens Within Us.” The poem’s theme is in line with the main theme of the section, namely the ageing and death of older parents, and the persona’s (adult daughter) management of feelings of loss and grief. The collection can be said to be partly autobiographical, as Crozier dedicated Inventing the Hawk to the memory of her deceased father, who had passed away in 1990.

Crozier was forty-four years old when this collection was published. Crozier’s parental loss in early middle age will be significant for subsequent poetry collections in terms of theme as regards the depiction of father-daughter relationships. Parental terminal illness and the adult daughter’s coping strategies in “The Gardens Within Us” are presented symbolically via two contrasting gardens: a vegetable garden in which there only remains

“A single row of Swiss chard” (l. 1), and, on the other hand, a metaphorical garden growing inside the persona’s father, which works as an analogy to the expansion of the persona’s father’s cancer: “. . . my father’s / cancer blooming in his veins. Now the only blossoms are inside” (ll. 12-14). In this case, the analogy of the garden functions as a lyrical way to manage the father’s decline at a psychological level; it is soothing to imagine a garden blossoming inside a dying parent, instead of picturing the actual illness in its process of killing him. Thus, the persona creates an imaginary healing garden which is intended to both relieve her traumatic stress from her father’s deadly illness, and

comfort her for her future loss. The crucial function that healing gardens fulfil is explained by landscape planners Ulrika A. Stigsdotter and Patrik Grahn when they state that

“[h]aving access to a garden at home seems to be of fundamental importance in reducing stress” (3). Likewise, psychologists Yuko Heath and Robert Gifford in their study of the eight therapeutic gardens in a multi-level care facility infer that for family members

“going into the garden to connect with nature provides them a good opportunity to be relieved from the stress of having ailing family members” (39). The stanza reporting the cancer growing inside the father in the form of a garden is preceded by the first stanza in which the real garden functions as a presentation of the season, namely the end of summer, and the beginning of the cold. This works on two levels. On the one hand, autumn has been related to the beginning of old age and physical decline since, at least, Shakespearean times (Carr 24). On the other hand, the extinct outer garden contrasts with the blossoming inner garden; thus, the dramatic effect of the cancer-garden analogy increases. The poem closes with a final stanza in which the season parallels the father’s health state, and which hints at the father’s death and subsequent incineration. Such a method of final disposition of the father’s corpse is recurrent in Crozier’s oeuvre, as narrated in Crozier’s memoir Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (“till death do us part” 145-150), and in the poem “Beauty in All Things” (Everything Arrives at the Light 16-17).

As different from the previous two poems, in “Is Every Poem an Elegy?” (2019) Crozier does not invite the adult reader to empathise with parental loss; in its stead, this poem relates a shovel to both a garden and death in general. The poem, which is contained within the collection The House the Spirit Builds, is in line with two of the main themes in this poetry and photography collection, namely old age and death, and attention to detail in a naturalcultural environment, as all the photographs and related poems were

first drafted by the author at Wintergreen’s educational retreat’s sustainable facilities, in the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve (Ottawa, Canada). The persona in “Is Every Poem an Elegy?” sees the shovel leaning against the wall and wonders where the gardener who uses it is and what she will need it for: “(Where is the gardener / so careful with her tools–

/ called to the city, gone for a nap?)” (ll. 10-13). The persona wishes the shovel is used to turn the soil in order to plant “a garden bed” (l. 14) and not to dig a grave. The personified soil, for its part, wishes to be worked on: “the spring-awakened / blameless earth / waiting to be turned” (ll. 16-18). The poem acknowledges the interrelatedness of human and non- human nature in an instance of intra-action, in feminist and new materialism theorist Karen Barad’s terms. Barad defines intra-action as

the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual

‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action (Barad, Meeting the Universe 33)

Following Barad’s notion, the shovel and the earth in the poem are not portrayed as separate entities but as entangled phenomena. That is, the shovel’s purpose as a tool is to turn the ground, and in turn, the ground needs the shovel to be oxygenated. In addition, the cultural associations that the shovel and the ground share with gardening and corpse- burying constitute a blurring of the agentic boundaries between them. Such an association is related by the persona to her own life experiences when in the title she wonders if all poems are elegies, i.e. tributes to the deceased. Therefore, the shovel and the earth are both interconnected and engage in intra-action through the persona’s relationship with them across time and space.