Last summer I had the chance to plant and harvest my first garden. The tranquility of weeding is a pleasure I’d recommend to any writer. I came up with many good ideas for stories and poems while thinning out the carrots or watering the radishes. (My other writer’s block killer is mowing the lawn. There is something about so much monotonous action that spurs on the creative mind.)
There is a better reason to go into the garden: inspiration. It brings you closer to the things that we innately fear. The occasional reminder of these facts can make your horrific description more repulsive, gruesome or hard-hitting.
In the garden you will come across many pests. These annoying bugs and worms are not frightening in themselves but when you pull up a carrot and find it split open and housing two fat slugs, you’ll think instantly of a human body riddled with weird alien worms. Or a head of lettuce cut open for cleaning dislodges a nest of earwigs that just explode from hiding.
Onion maggots are a nasty surprise when you pull up what looks like a healthy specimen but you find white worms chewing away the bulb like the back of your head squirming with corruption. The odor of rotting onion will only make it all the more repulsive. My cherry trees are a short way from the garden. Lovely fat cherries by July but be careful! The black treasure houses its own invasion. Hornets and wasps dig their way into the tops, just waiting for some unfortunate fool to reach up from below…
Then there is the infectious ones. A clump of green bugs on the celery, clamped together like a cluster of Puppet-masters, like a hundred ticks draining a victim. Slime trails on the rocks tell of wicked things that have passed while you weren’t looking. The mushrooms that grow on the lawn, over the septic field, get you wondering. Some of them are as large as your foot! Or is it a head, a bald white head sticking out of the ground? Zombies from the septic field!
Also in the garden you’ll find the tenancy of plant life. Pumpkin vines wrapping jealously around anything they can find will remind you of tentacled beasties. The relative strength of these tendrils will surprise you. Imagine them grown to the size of ropes. Some plants grow twisted and deformed. Crowded carrots don’t always become Bugs Bunny snack but mandrake roots of evil shape. They curl into the ground like helixes, waiting for you to pull them.
After an hour in the garden I’m ready to inflict all the terrible things I’ve seen on some poor sap in a Lovecraftian tale of terror. And you just thought there’d be fresh peas for supper.
