Gardens in Old Age

a page. (ll. 34-38)

The advantages described in this quotation are in line with Linn Sandberg’s theory of Affirmative Old Age, according to which “sexuality and ageing are analysed . . . as positive difference” (19) in order to overcome the common dichotomy within discourses of ageing of the decline narrative versus positive and successful ageing. From this perspective, while Crozier depicts the middle-aged couple’s skin as having lost the elastic properties of young skin, she also compares it to parchment, a valuable format on which manuscripts used to be written. In addition, the middle-aged couple’s skin is described with the verb “shine,” to which only positive connotations are attached. In this case the skin/parchment shines because the pages of their bodies have been turned many times, thus suggesting that their bodies have turned to each other for love and emotional support on many occasions. That is why they can understand each other very well: “We read each other, nearsightedly, / hands and tongues and even toes find where / the skin gives way”

(ll. 38-40). Thus, difference in skin characteristics is seen as positive difference in line with Sandberg’s theory.

benefits that older adults ascribe to nature, many older adults in residential care reap the benefits of natural environments by simply observing them from an indoor location (304).

Therefore, it is important to acknowledge older adults’ both passive and active interactions with nature in order to fully comprehend the importance that garden spaces have for them. This notwithstanding, Crozier’s poems focus on active interactions with outdoor garden environments. Specifically, the poem “Gardens” relates fulfilling family relationships to a collaborative tending of the garden. As such, both “Potato Planters”

(1988) and “Gardens” (1992) represent the garden trope in a way that is in line with horticultural therapy, as both poems depict the many emotional health benefits for the personae of working in the garden. “Gardens” describes the differences in the types of gardens that can be grown on the West coast and on the prairies due to both the different weather conditions and kinds of soil. “Gardens” is contained under the fourth and last section, entitled “Moving toward Speech,” within Crozier’s eighth poetry collection, Inventing the Hawk. The two main themes in this section are death and environmental awareness, especially as regards both communion with nature and a critique against the killing of wild animals. In “Gardens,” the persona explains the situation of an unidentified male she is emotionally close to who is moving to the West coast after retirement:

Moving away from winter, he retires to the coast, westering, mile zero . . . .

On the coast the soil is thin, a linen napkin over stones. There, he says,

he’ll grow different things, some basil, a little thyme. . . .” (ll. 1-2, 11-14)

The differences between the types of soil and the plants that can be grown in the garden on the coast and the garden on the prairies are reminders of the physical distance that separates the adult male from his mother. This is an emotionally challenging situation for the son, who would rather live closer to his mother:

. . . Back where he was born

his mother now would be soaking seeds

in a shallow bowl, snow outside the window.

He’d give anything to be there

crossing time as if it were

a landscape he had dreamed, a garden” (ll. 19-24)

Lines 22 and 23 suggest that the mother already passed away. That would explain the reason why the son is so eager to travel back in time, even though he knows it is not possible. The son’s adaptation to living far apart from his late mother, that is, his inner growth, is linked to the growth of plants for self-sustainment, which fosters a keen connection with the more-than-human world. At the same time, the son’s vision of his mother working in the garden demonstrates “the creative potential shared by both gardener and poet in their creation of aesthetic visions of the world (a ‘dream’ and a

‘garden’) into being” (Boyd 330). Such an intertwining of time frames (past and present) – which can also be found, albeit in a different way, in the poem “Is Every Poem an Elegy,” as analysed below – and poetic and real gardens by the male gardener/poet constitutes a therapeutic landscape of the mind, which helps him cope with his homesickness and grief. The healing memories of gardens as a coping strategy for missing the (late) mother after having moved to a distant location finds a parallel in Crozier’s own

life, as she moved to the Saanich Peninsula on Vancouver Island (British Columbia) in 1991 to work at the University of Victoria. As she mentions in her memoir and in some of her poems, the distance that separated Crozier from her mother was often heart- breaking. Crozier also acknowledges the indelible imprint of the Saskatchewan prairies from her youth and early adulthood as a source of inspiration for the pervasive image of the prairies throughout her career, as explained in Chapter 4. It is in this sense that Crozier revisits memories of the relationship she had with nature, prominently that of the prairies more than that of a specific garden, in different stages of her life-course to feel closer to home, among other reasons.

Whereas “Gardens” (1992)³² depicts the beginning of old age, or what is also known as young-old age, “Rake” and “Wheelbarrow” portray older age in connection to the garden trope. Even though the specific ages of the late-life individuals described in the poems are not made explicit, their efforts at coping with physical frailty suggest that they are in Erikson’s ninth stage of development, namely in their eighties or nineties. Both

“Rake” and “Wheelbarrow” are contained within Crozier’s first collection of poetic prose entitled The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things (2013). The collection, whose prose poems are presented in alphabetical order with a different number of prose poems for each letter in the alphabet, presents everyday objects as suitable topics for poetic prose either in Crozier’s defence of their aesthetic value or because of their relevance for life on Earth. Both “Rake” and “Wheelbarrow” are framed within the recurrent theme in the collection of old age. In the case of “Rake,” it contains instances of social critique against the treatment of the aged in our Western cultures, which is also one of the main themes in The Book of Marvels. The poem entitled “Rake” (2013) deals with a common garden tool as an excuse to criticize the age-related stereotypes that are

32 Whenever a year is added after the title of a poem, the year refers to the year of publication of the collection in which the poem is included.

pervasive in contemporary Western societies, a set of beliefs that leading gerontologist Robert Butler devoted his career to redress (Achenbaum, Robert Butler) thus inspiring present-day gerontologists and age scholars to continue such efforts. This prose poem pictures a version of what is widely believed to be the history of the rake. According to Crozier’s account, aged individuals were the ones who used their fingers as rakes in ancient times. Since this was a valuable asset, older people were highly esteemed: “The first rake was a hand. The older the better, rachitic fingers permanently bent, a scraping tool of bone and flesh. The aged, then, had a purpose and were not parted from the rest.”³³ However, with human development, rakes developed too. As a result, the persona claims that elderly people’s fingers were no longer needed, and therefore they lost their social value: “No one mentions . . . the exile of the aged.” The poem describes a situation that is unfortunately still prevalent nowadays, namely the devaluation and moral exclusion of the old in Western societies. As sociologist Toni Calasanti asserts,

Ageism includes categorization, stereotyping, and prejudice, but the most crucial aspect is exclusionary behaviour . . . A focus on exclusionary behaviour highlights social characteristics that help explain the persistence of ageism in the United States despite changing values and beliefs. (8)

Crozier adds further criticism alongside the neglect of the old, specifically the human lack of acknowledgement of what we learn from the animal world. Namely, the fact that humans developed their tools through imitation of animal behaviour, but such teachings of nature were never given credit for in historical accounts: “The next rake was a branch with the right configuration of twigs. A boy watched a crow use a tool, and so he made one, too. . . No one mentions the importance of the Corvus in the history of the rake or

33 There is no reference to lineation because the prose poems were written in sentences rather than lines, as Crozier clarified during our conversations while I was doing a month-long research stay at the University of Victoria, BC, in June 2022.

the exile of the aged.” In this prose poem, Crozier makes clear that the way Western societies disregard non-human nature is analogous to the ways the old are ignored.

Therefore, this prose poem is highly relevant in order to raise awareness of the shared othering and lack of agency that both nature and the aged have in contemporary Western societies. This is an issue that ecocriticism and ageing studies, respectively, intend to redress. Such efforts, I contend and the prose poem suggests, might be more fruitful through interdisciplinary approaches, such as the ones developed in the present dissertation.

Similarly, “Wheelbarrow” (2013) empowers the aged through a poetic response to William Carlos Williams’ Imagist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which was included in his 1923 collection Spring and All. The first sentence in Crozier’s prose poem evidences the intertextuality with Williams’ poem: “YES, SO MUCH depends,” which is an emphatic repetition of Williams’ first line “so much depends.” Crozier focuses on this common garden tool, the wheelbarrow, in order to express the old woman’s gratitude for it because of its extreme usefulness: “Though it seems commonplace when it’s at rest, the woman who guides it from the shed knows the fortitude and beauty of its nature. . . . she coaxes the wheelbarrow with the names her grandmother gave it: my wooden ox, my gliding horse.” The old woman relies on the wheelbarrow because of her failing strength as a result of her advanced age: “the woman who carries in her arms less and less each year . . . the slower step, the arthritic hip . . . the stooped back, the breathlessness.” The wheelbarrow is said to “accept” the difficulties of its tasks in the garden as well as the woman’s bodily decline. Nevertheless, the insistence on acceptance in the poem in relation to the woman’s failing body on the part of the wheelbarrow is most likely a call for Western societies to accept senescence as one more stage in the life-course and thus to avoid ageism. The following lines suggest this analogy, which highlights the

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).