We Speak, We Write and We Make Gardens: Toni Morrison's Dirty Hands

The untold connection between Toni Morrison’s love of gardening and her timeless prose.

When I first read Beloved, I had no idea that Toni Morrison’s other great passion lay not on the page, but in the soil. I didn’t know yet that her hands, callused from countless drafts, also cradled roots and guided vines. Morrison was, by all accounts, a master gardener, and while I’d always thought of her as someone who cultivated stories, I now think of her as someone who cultivated life itself.

Her garden, like her prose, thrived on contradiction. Orderly yet wild, controlled yet bursting with unruly growth. In her Hudson River home, she propagated plants with a quiet reverence that mirrored her careful nurturing of characters.

There was a jade plant she adored, a descendant of one gifted by Nelson Mandela she’d nurse back to health again and again. To Morrison, the act of tending her plants was more than a pastime, it was a kind of dialogue, a way to coax beauty from the earth and, in turn, from herself.

I imagine Morrison in her garden as I think about her work. I see her stooping over tender green shoots, her hands stained with soil, and I can’t help but think about Sethe’s back, described in Beloved as a “chokecherry tree.” Her writing, full of these natural metaphors, remind us that bodies and landscapes are entwined, that healing is as much a part of life as breaking. Just as she watered her garden, she nurtured her characters’ pain and joy, letting their stories grow in unexpected directions.

In Morrison’s world, growth always came with effort. Dirty hands, sweat, a willingness to kneel down and begin again. “We speak, we write, and we make gardens…That is how civilizations heal.” And she knew better than most that healing wasn’t pristine. It required mess and motion. The words on the page, like the plants in her garden, needed pruning and patience. They demanded a gardener who understood not just the beauty of the bloom, but the richness of the soil that fed it.

As a writer, I’ve stared at blank pages, felt the weight of silence and coiled under the pressure of creation. And now, when I think of Toni Morrison’s hands, both on her typewriter and in her garden, I think of the courage it takes to begin, the trust it takes to nurture something unseen. Her garden wasn’t just a metaphor for her creativity; it was her other masterpiece, a living testament to the kind of labor she knew was necessary for anything meaningful to grow.

Morrison’s garden, like her novels, wasn’t about perfection. It was about faith. Faith that what she planted would eventually bear fruit, faith that even the most unruly growth could be shaped into something extraordinary. To me, this is her lasting lesson: that whether you’re writing a novel or planting a garden, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to trust in the process, the messy, beautiful process, and keep digging until the magic begins.