If you’re a writer, or shooting some kind of film, or employed, you probably don’t have time to tend your garden. You probably don’t even have a garden. “Gardening” is trendy now, but like “green” or “locavore,” it’s a word mostly used in marketing campaigns to make consumers buy more shit they don’t need, like composting drums (every living thing composts itself free of charge), Miracle Grow (didn’t need it in the Garden of Eden, don’t need it now), or upside down tomato pots (remember gravity boots?).

I was born into gardening, so I never really quit doing it, wherever I’ve lived.  I had a garden in L.A. about the size of a snooker table that was crazy productive (a weird combination of chilies and bromeliads). Right now I am blessed with some acres, so I have a huge garden—far more than I can maintain. In the end, gardening is a dirty business, mostly weeding. If I ever see another picture of Martha Stewart with her little pink sweater and blue gloves, holding a shovel, standing in a manicured garden that would require a labor force roughly the size of the Baltimore Ravens to maintain, as if she did it all herself, I will vomit.

This time of year, gardens come into a melancholy old age. Pumpkins show up, leaves shrivel, spiders and stink bugs walk the earth. And since I’ve been filmmaking lately, my garden is very weedy. Not a big deal, there’s a lot of food under all those weeds (e.g., a truck load of sweet potatoes). The other day I had my three-year-old daughter stomping barefoot in a tub of grapes (just for the juice, no time for wine-making). I’m kind of obsessive about black raspberries, and lima beans too. I’m partial to Hatch Chilies, but I will grow Poblanos and Serranos. (I do want to check out the hometown heirloom fish pepper, so this is a shout-out to Mick Kipp.)

Gardening and screenwriting are pretty much the same thing. The seed of an idea is planted, takes hold, is nurtured through backbreaking work, and when it becomes ripe enough to pick there’s a payoff — unless the bugs, drought or hail get to it first. (Come to think of it, gardening is a lot easier than screenwriting.)  Gardening’s relationship to the creative mystery, you may call it spiritual, has been expressed in countless proverbs, metaphors, and scraps of wisdom. Here are a few I pulled out of a hat:

“In gardens, beauty is a by-product.  The main business is sex and death.” Llewelyn

“The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.” Shaw

“I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.” Erskine

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Jung

“I garden rather than meditate, attend church, or read ‘The Secret.’  I get all the benefits of those other things, plus a free dinner.”

— david warfield