For a long number of years I had been writing freelance pieces for garden, health and lifestyle magazines and the occasional newspaper supplement – the sort of work that could be done over a cup of coffee in the morning or at the kitchen table in the evening after work. But after 3 bestselling Holistic Gardener books for Mercier Press and entering into my second year as a weekend gardening columnist for the Irish Examiner, I am beginning to realise that I am a full time writer – that it is my occupation and not just a preoccupation.
I still garden, I still lecture, liaise and advise, I still help develop horticultural projects and each year I create a garden at Bloom but writing is the day job now and those other demands are facilitated more and more over the morning coffee and in the evenings after I have my writing done. Deadlines dictate. The box room is now my office and I burn daylight in it. It overlooks my garden and the window is curtainless and constantly open so I can have a foot - as it were - in the real world. I like to hear the rain, birdsong and rustle of trees, feel the gale and see the hail, see the blue sky and clouds, know the sun is there and catch the wafts of jasmine that grow below. I get to stay connected. That way I don’t feel I’m on a wordcount treadmill.
I write about gardening, about health, about food and about Irish culture – it’s not fiction so in a way it needs to be done in a fixed place. You have to be in the room with non-fiction, it’s not the sort of thing where you can be pushing a shopping trolley idly down the freezer aisle and - flash of inspiration! - your protagonist becomes a disgruntled Icelandic cod fisherman with a penchant for frozen yoghurt and not a laconic cop with two weeks to retirement and a marital crisis that overlaps with his latest case and his newfound love of salsa dancing. I may get the inspiration to make a fever cure remedy for children into a frozen desert, but there is no changing the course of a book once it is started. Its facts not figurative.
The Holistic Gardener books are all about practical herbalism – how to help yourself – and while deeply researched and peppered with scientific study and prepared with academic rigor, it is nice to make them as accessible as a recipe for a cooling granita. They are all about what you might have in the pantry to mix with a bit of something you have growing in the garden or windowbox to get the chemical, mineral or other that will do the job of synthesised pharma or commercial product. When you think today’s foil-packed aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) was once a chew of powdered willow bark (salicylic acid) and that Cuchullain used watercress to get his Conor McGregor on... there is plenty of possibility in returning to the natural.
Published by Mercier Press, The Holistic Gardener is available nationwide and can be bought here or be in for a chance to win a signed copy here!
