Planted Passions: Review of Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic
Sylvia Legris, Garden Physic.
New Directions Publishing, 2021. $16.95.
Order a copy from New Directions Publishing
A euphoric and euphonic ode to gardening, Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a poetic tour de force that connects the passionate gardener to her ecological and linguistic milieus. The garden becomes a metaphor for our verbal habits, our lives and our loves, our ways of relating to one another and the living world we belong to. Legris fights against the modern objectification of plants in particular, opening the book with “Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants,” a poem that immediately confronts the instrumentalization of our leafy neighbours: “Plants reduced to the idea of plants reduced to woodcuts / (circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile.”
Legris is not merely an ardent lover of plants; she does not only celebrate their medicinal qualities and rejoice in their striking diversity; she understands their deep material entanglements with soil, air, and human lives—in her book, the gardener is a part of the very body of the garden of this earth. Plants are not passive objects that human subjects observe, cultivate, and utilize. They are full of desires. They call us into a thick forest of smells, tastes, and colours.
Her collection has shown me just how far I’ve strayed from communing with plants. Even if edible and medicinal plants become us—even if we cannot breathe without them—we have lost language for plants. The unpleasant truth is, I can barely name what I see walking through the forest. Legris’s collection insists on naming and listing plant names that rarely cross our lips. I can more readily recognize Coca Cola, Microsoft, Chrome, Facebook, Visa and FedEx than I can Lung Moss, Skeletonweed, Bladder Herb, Mouse Ear, Hurt-sickle, Piss-a-bed, Oyster Plant, and other floral etceteras.
For Legris, plants are active agents, subjects in their own rights who make demands and act upon us, humans: “The yard wants what the yard wants.” Garden Physic is a love letter to the unruly wilderness of the un/domesticated yard:
At the centre of the garden the heart.
Red as any rose. Pulsing
balloon vine. Love in a puff.
Heartseed, heart-of-the-earth.
A continuous flow of red.
The section that seduced me most is “Floral Correspondences,” a series of short love notes scented with the timeless romance between novelist Vita Sackville-West and her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson. The couple created a stunning garden at their Sissinghurst Castle, an expression of their love and unique personalities. Whereas she was the amateur gardener who planted with great enthusiasm, he provided the architectural framework for her seasonal gardening schemes. And although sometimes dangerously flirting with the cliché, the language Legris choses to express their botanic devotion touches me.
Her: “My heart flowers, drop by drop… Out the window my love lies bleeding.”
Him: “Red is steadfastness, the heart, a hummingbird chasing nectar.”
Organized in four distinct yet related sections—if not rhizomic; if not like a garden—Garden Physic concludes with “Notes and Sources” and an “Index” as one might expect of a science textbook. The fourth section of the collection, “De Materia Medica,” is by far the most hybrid and experimental. Written after the ancient Greek botanist, physician and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides’s original De Materia Medica, the section abounds in maps, photographs and illustrations. At times so dense it nears on the occult, it momentarily lifts the veil of its hermetic herbal hermeneutics and lets us in: “Wild iris, flowering of grief and love lost.”
Reading these poems not only gives one a clearer sense of Sylvia Legris but also countless insights into the plants, petals and roots that have no doubt flavoured her life. She captures the perfume and poetry of the flowers and vegetation that have strikingly coloured her hours. And: she welcomes the books and historical figures she has shared language with, the vernacular of forgotten pharmacologists, the words of dead lovers whose mutual appreciation of gardens she so clearly shares.
Sanita Fejzić is an award-winning poet, novelist and playwright. Fejzić has published her poetry, literary essays and short stories in magazines and journals across Canada. In 2018, her poem, “(M)other” was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize; it was subsequently turned into a children’s story and translated into French by Sylvie Nicolas. Her first book of fiction, Psychomachia, Latin for “battle of the soul,” was shortlisted for the Ken Klonsky Novella Prize and the Canada ReLit Awards. Recently, she was longlisted for the CBC Non-Fiction Prize. The short story that received this honour will be published in a forthcoming non-fiction book, Affection for Otherness. Her first play, Blissful State of Surrender, was staged at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Feb-March 2022. Fejzić is also a Teaching Fellow in Gender Studies at Queen’s University where she is also a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies.