Friday, November 8th, 2013

Writing Prompt – Putting the Garden to Bed for the Winter

© Mariykaa | Dreamstime.comThe Husband of Awesome™ and I closed up the garden last weekend. We wrapped up the delicate figs with blankets, hoping to baby them over until the spring. We gave the lawn a last once over, hoping it won’t need to be cut again this year. I hacked about a bazillion volunteer Rose of Sharon bushes out of the front flower bed.

There’s more to do, fertilizing and getting empty pots back into the shed, for instance. We just ran out of time.

I love tending the garden, whether it’s spring–and the ground is ripe for rebirth–or fall, when blooms are dying off and everything is ready for sleep. I love the dirt. (And puttering is a great time to noodle over plots.)

Gardens are so full of metaphor…and wonderful inspirations for writing.

Here’s Your Prompt:

  • Write about the sending down of roots (or balling up of them -if the plant is trapped in a pot). Write about making roots of your own, or pulling up your roots and moving on. Write about severing your roots.
     
  • Write about a character that’s been transplanted. If you journal, write about a move you made.
     
  • Write about a garden in the spring, or the summer, or the winter, or the fall. Carefully choose imagery to depict the season. Does a tree look the same in summer as spring?
     
  • Weeds. Write about pulling weeds in a garden, or culling the weeds from your life. Write about a character living in the weeds. Write about weed. 😉
     
  • Is former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins correct, “The soil is full of marvels…”?
     
  • What grows in the garden of earthly delights?
     

Good Luck!

 

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Image Copyright © Mariykaa | Dreamstime.com. Used by permission.

Friday, March 30th, 2012

Writing Prompt: Planting Seeds, Tending Gardens

Stinky Bradford PearsSpring has sprung!

And it’s not always sweet. Anybody live around those horrible Bradford Pear trees?

(They’re native to China and Korea and were brought to the states in the 1900s. As far as I’m concerned, they should have kept them!)

Spring has me thinking of gardening, so today’s prompt is all about planting, sowing, and tending.

Here’s Your Prompt:

  • Write about turning soil, the underside of leaves, worms in the dirt, pulling weeds, finding hard-packed clay, grubs, or dirt under your fingernails.
     
  • Write about being transplanted.
     
  • It’s a hot summer day, and you’re in the garden…
     
  • His gardens next your admiration call,
    On every side you look, behold the wall!
    No pleasing intricacies intervene,
    No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
    Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
    And half the platform just reflects the other,
    The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
    Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
    With here a fountain never to be play’d,
    And there a summer-house that knows no shade.
     
    ~ Alexander Pope
     
  • Take the word “flower,” or the name of a specific flower (rose, tulip, daisy, narcissus, chrysanthemum) and quickly jot down a word for each letter in the flower’s name. Now write a story, poem, essay or journal entry using all of the words.
     
  • “Morning, Glory!”
     
  • Write about the scents of night flowers, being alone in a midnight garden.
     
  • “Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well…” ~ Walt Whitman
     
  • What grows in a garden of earthy delights?
     
  • True or False:

    There is no unbelief;
    Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod
    And waits to seee it push away the clod,
    He trusts in God.
     
    ~ Elizabeth York Case
     

  • If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
    Usurping ivy, briar, or idle moss;
    Who, all for want of pruning with intrusion
    Infect they sap, and live on they confusion.
     
    ~ Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors. Act II. Scene 2