Sylvia Legris makes connections between botany and anatomy in her poetry collection Garden Physic
This interview originally aired on April 2, 2022.
A book of poetry about flowers doesn't need to be dainty or sentimental, and Sylvia Legris' latest collection Garden Physic bears this out, with poems rooted in the evocative language and lore of botany.
Garden Physic acts as a guide to a multitude of plants, their medicinal properties and their cultural associations through the ages. It also includes a playful look at the challenges of tending a backyard plot in a climate of cool summers and cold winters.
Garden Physic is Legris' sixth book of poetry. Her collection Nerve Squall won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006 as well as the Pat Lowther Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets.
Legris has also been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2001 won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize for her poem Fishblood Sky. She also served as editor of Saskatoon-based literary magazine Grain from 2008 to 2011.
Legris spoke to Shelagh Rogers from her home in Saskatoon.
Sylvia's garden
"At the end of every season I say to myself, 'Never again. I'm not doing this. It's so much work.' And then around January, I start imagining what I'm going to put in. So it varies — I'm still pretty much a novice, but a lot of vegetables, a lot of beans, chard and flowers.
The language of both anatomy and botany — and there are intersections and correspondences between them — they're so rich and also really historically heavy.
"I like the traditional: so easy to grow that even a kid in kindergarten can grow — flowers like zinnias and marigolds. But I'm learning the benefits of perennials. It took me a long time to realize that it's actually a lot more work to put in annuals every year.
"In short, my garden is messy — I think that would describe it."
The language of botany
"The language of both anatomy and botany — and there are intersections and correspondences between them — they're so rich and also historically heavy. I'm interested in the etymology of language. When I'm writing a poem, I spend a lot of time actually researching the history of key words. For me, it's so specific and so weighted historically — it's a minefield.
"For example, in Garden Physic, I have those indexes at the back which have all those names of plants. I have them divided into idiosyncratic categories — one of them is Anatomy and Afflictions — and you see these names of plants that are connected to the human body. We've lost, for the most part, that sense of, 'Why is it called that? Why is kidney wort called kidney wort or liver leaf called liver leaf?'
"At one point, they were called that because they were used as remedies for those particular parts of the body. I'm interested in taking those historical associations and transplanting them into a contemporary context — or a contemporary garden, in effect."
Pruning the poems
"I started exploring plants when I was working on The Hideous Hidden. There's a series of poems there that explore the linguistic intersections of botany and glands. When I was writing those poems, I just started delving into gardening. The more I gardened, the more I became interested in writings about gardening and the language.
"What I think of as a core poem in the book is The Garden Body: A Florilegium. It came from trying to imagine what it would look like if you could anatomically arrange a garden plot so that five fingers would be out on the periphery, and you'd have heart trefoil where the heart would be, and the plants named after organs in the middle of what would be a torso.
Usually I go out and quite intentionally think, 'I'm going to garden and I'm going to think about my writing at the same time.'
"There's something interesting about gardening. You're doing this physical activity and the things that are more mechanical or automatic, like weeding or just digging, but there's also something happening in the brain at the same time.
"It's very meditative, that activity. When I'm doing something like that, it's like my brain is swirling with ideas. Usually I go out and quite intentionally think, 'I'm going to garden and I'm going to think about my writing at the same time.'
"Often the two coalesce when I go sit down at my computer."
LISTEN | Sylvia Legris on Saskatchewan Weekend:
What's in a name?
"Every time I would encounter an unusual plant name, I would write it down. I had a notebook with all these plant names, and they're so irresistible I couldn't not use them in some way.
"I thought that an index would be perfect. The names are poetic, for want of a better term, in themselves. They're so evocative and heavy. There's one called 'Ass of the Priest.' How great is that?"
Sylvia Legris's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
