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Writing with the Garden: Louise Glück's The Wild Iris and an Exercise for Plant Writing
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
It's high spring, almost summer, and the world is in its greening. Gardens are blooming and, everywhere, the plants sing to us.
It's no secret that I write with plants. Read any of my work – my novel, Leafskin, or my poetry chapbook, The Cemetery Cure – and you'll find the green leafing into it. I seek inspiration in the flowering of the world around me. I'm perpetually curious about the ways of plants, these sun-transforming creatures who root and reach.
Gardens, these human-cultivated, flora-filled places, fascinate. A garden is where humans and plants meet. In the best of gardens, I see a kind of mutuality. Respect and care crossing species. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about reciprocal relationships between humans and plants in The Serviceberry, describing the way that plants create food as an act of love. Sophie Strand writes about the way nature "courts" us if we take notice: "The world is a love story that wants desperately to include us again." It is not only that we love nature. Nature, perhaps, loves us back.
And nature is everywhere. We can find gardens in any place we choose to look. In our backyards. In our windowsills of potted plants. In our parks and public gardens. Even in roadside meridians. Here in Portland, we have a famous tiny garden, Mill Ends Park, that holds the record for being the smallest park in the world. We also have the vast Leach Botanical Garden, where I recently spent a rainy day wandering and listening to the sounds of raindrop meeting leaf.
Next month, I'll be teaching Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems online. In this course, we'll write with plants, in and out of the garden. We'll look at poems from Louise Glück's The Wild Iris, a classic garden collection, and a perpetual favorite of mine. In this book, Glück brings the voices of the garden into her poetry. Flowers speak to us in our own human language. In his essay "In the Key of Green," John C. Ryan writes of the voices Glück evokes in The Wild Iris, calling them "ecological":
"a nexus of things, feelings, and memories, voice is ecological; it is neither a property of the flower, nor of the poet-supplicant, nor the garden itself, but of their interdependencies and points of contact."
Glück's flowers are not speaking in personifications, but, rather, in interconnections. This is what I love most about this book: it is a record of the human and the nonhuman reaching toward each other.
It is not easy, as a human writer, to bring plants into our work without overly imposing our humanness on them. When we try to process observations with our human brains and render them in our human languages, we inevitably person them. The trick, I've found, is to both accept this and work against it, to try to write from within the tension of writing what we cannot truly comprehend. The result can feel like an uncanny combination of specific concrete detail and a kind of mystical unknowing. The title poem of Glück's collection describes the iris awakening after winter, bringing our knowledge of this plant–that it overwinters in a bulb, deep in the soil and emerges in the spring–into an imaginative realm rendered through human emotion and experience. The poem describes the "voice" of the emerging iris, the plant's feeling of being able to "speak" again, in human terms, directly addressing the human reader:
"You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:"
In this stanza, the plant reaches toward us, trying to render experience in our language and realms of understanding. Then the poem turns. The flower blossoms, but is no longer telling us of human speech. Instead, we have water, a plant element, but not just water, seawater. The iris reaches outward, into the ecosystem, to find the image to hold the experience of blossoming.
"from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water."
This last stanza moves us outward from the human into the more-than-human, giving us a clear resolution to the process of the iris's emergence in an uncanny image where petals become saltwater and shadow.
I love the way this final image feels. It's strangeness, it's beauty, and the way it finds a language, not of words, but of water, reaching for something that exists both outside of the human and plant lexicon (a fountain) and, elementally, inside human and plant bodies (water).
This poem works with the iris, from a place of deep knowledge and observation. It inhabits a space of connection between the writer and the plant. Though we, as humans, can never truly render the experience of another species, we can write from the space of reaching toward it. And in that reaching, in that desire for connection, wonder is born.
An Exercise for Plant Writing
For this exercise, you don't need to have your own garden. You can do this in a park or public garden, in your weed-overtaken backyard, or even at the bus stop with a dandelion coming up through the sidewalk. This also works in your apartment with a potted plant. If no actual plant is possible, you can even do this with images or scents that evoke the plant for you.
- Choose a plant to work with. This may be a plant you know or plant you have just encountered. Choose the plant who draws you, who you feel most curious about or connected with in the moment.
- If you are able, it can be helpful to sit with this plant while you do this exercise. You can also imagine this plant in your mind. Use your senses to observe. What does the plant look like? What does it feel like, smell like? Does it have flowers? Leaves? What colors?
- At this point, you may find yourself inspired to write. Go with it. Sometimes we find a connection with a plant and need to follow the path of intuition rather than logic. At any point in this process, if inspiration comes, if the plant is speaking to you, just go write. You can always come back to the process later to expand or deepen your work.
- Consider this plant, their shapes, their growth, their colors, their scent. What do you know about them? This may be from firsthand experience interacting with them, from stories, memories, science, or folklore you associate with them, or from what you imagine or intuit about them. Make notes about what you know or imagine.
- Research. Learn something new about this plant. I like to search for the plant online and look them up in some of my plant books. When I research, I approach from both scientific and folkloric angles. I want to know how the plant works and also what stories people have gathered around the plant over time.
- Let this plant guide your work in some way. You might try writing a poem to or about the plant. You might mimic the plant's growth with the shape of your work. You might write a story about a human character experiencing something akin to something the plant experiences. You might rewrite a folktale that features this plant. Or you may simply see where the words take you while you are thinking of this plant.
- Once you have written something, if you are working with a specific plant you know and are able to be physically near, you might try reading it aloud to them.
If you'd like to read more about writing with plants, I've detailed my own process of "Writing with Daffodils" on my Substack, Writing Toward Nature.
Miranda Schmidt's whole practice rests on a simple, radical idea: that wonder is born in the reaching, in the desire to connect with a life we can never fully know. If that idea pulls at you, you can carry it well past a single exercise. In Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems, Schmidt's six-week generative workshop beginning July 6, 2026, you'll write six new pieces alongside gardens, pets, animals, trees, and ecosystems, in the company of writers from every genre and level. Find a plant, follow it onto the page, and see where the reaching takes you.
Six weeks, six new pieces, and a living practice for writing with the more-than-human. Class begins Monday, July 6, 2026.
Save Your Seat in Writing with Plants & Animals →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
