Cultivating Words: A Brief Comparison of Writing and Gardening
This 6-page undergraduate essay compares gardening and writing. In an alternating pattern, this essay claims that gardening and writing are both processes and texts which have been used to express historical ideas of power, aesthetics, and ideas of man and nature through formal structures and through a symbolic system of ordering. Both writing and gardening are creative processes which create texts that can be read through languages of symbolism. Both are historical texts influenced by aesthetic movements and historical struggles for power. Significantly, both have been used in the past as tools of culture in order to assert power over others. Both require a blank space in order to create, and both create a violence or trauma out of the chaos of that empty space, even though ultimately both can provide through-provoking creations of beauty. Finally, both writing and gardening as texts and processes make use of structures and ordering in order to create.
