Austin Kleon

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Another cactus surgery

Here is Meghan after performing another cactus surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus, who had once again sprouted an offspring keeping G from growing:

In a newsletter from last summer, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work. (We’re often encouraged to discard what doesn’t fit in our work — but what if you cut those things and plant them elsewhere?)

Here is Giuseppe (on the right) with all the offspring of Giuseppe:

You may wonder why the offspring aren’t crested! A crested cactus is the result of injury or mutation and not heredity, so the form isn’t passed down to the offspring. And the reason you want to cut off the offspring is because they will compete with the crested growth. (Succulents, man! Fascinating!)

More gardening metaphors

In this week’s Tuesday letter, I wrote about 7 more gardening metaphors for creative work.

Even more to add to the compost heap later:

1) “Deadheading,” a kind of pruning in which you’re trying to redirect the plant’s growth

2) Grafting, which I’ve been reading about in John McPhee’s Oranges:

Citrus does not come true from seed. If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up. If you plant a seed of that grapefruit, you might get a bitter lemon. With a graft, however, what you saw was what you got.

Filed under: gardening

Gardening metaphors

In today’s newsletter, I write about gardening metaphors:

I love living with a gardener because not only do I get to enjoy the harvest without doing much (if any) of the work, I also get exposed to gardening tips which become metaphors for my own creative work. (The “gardening” tag on my blog is now dozens of posts deep and the last chapter of my book Keep Going is called “Plant Your Garden.”)

“When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking for plants, we say we are going on a foray,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. “When writers do the same, we should call it a metaphoray.” (I prefer “metaphoraging” — searching for metaphors.)

I collect gardening metaphors because the lessons of gardening are basically the opposite of the messages we receive from our controlling, technocratic, perfectionist, algorithmic, optimizing status quo.

“The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist,” writes Michael Pollan. “Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.” (Sounds like, well, life in general.)

You can read the rest here.

The teacher as gardener

John Holt in 1983, talking to WBOS-Radio, on how teaching is like gardening:

The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.

So where do teachers learn to teach?

You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?”

Filed under: gardening, John Holt

Sleep, creep, leap

Now is one of my favorite times of year, the time of new growth.

I mentioned in a recent newsletter how the prickly pear let you see exponential growth in slow motion, and a reader alerted me to the gardening rule of thumb for perennial plants, “Sleep, Creep, Leap.”

In the first year, a perennial will focus on its foundation, anchoring its roots, so it can survive dormancy in the winter.

The second year, the plant comes out of dormancy and starts to grow, both up and down — “you can expect to see blooms, though the plant hasn’t quite reached its full size or full flowering potential.”

In the third year, the plant takes off and comes into full form.

Another gardening metaphor we can use for creative work!

So many of my projects tend to follow this sleep, creep, leap structure.

At first, there’s some idea taking root, but you don’t know anything about it, it’s growing underground, without your knowledge.

Then, you find an idea creeping, blossoming and growing, so you nurture it.

Finally, the idea bursts forth into full life.

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