For the next two weeks  the ‘Writing Group’ will meet in the Botanical Gardens to write some site-specific poems in response to the gardens….

Cambridge University Botanic Garden
1 Brookside, Cambridge. CB2 1JE

Week 1:

Wednesday 13th November 1-3 pm

Introduction to ‘Voicing the Garden Project’ the with Juliet Day at 1:30 in the Education  Room

Week 2:

Thursday 21st November 1-3 pm

(Meet Brookside Gate at 12:50)

Bring student card for free entry to the gardens

r.s.v.p. : rso10@cam.ac.uk if you would like to attend…..

All Welcome!

best wishes

Dr. Redell Olsen
Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow

Ideas for Writing in the Garden

Write for 15 mins in one place. Stop and consider what  you have been prioritising in your writing.

What is natural / unnatural about writing?

Take another 15 mins and make a conscious effort to make the focus of your writing different. Repeat. You might consider variously shifts between different attentions to scale, sound, sight….  

Consider the different types of spaces in the garden. How are they used differently?

What different kinds of writing are appropriate for each space?

Visit some of the places listed on the map and write your own poems in response to each place as a kind of alternative mapping.

Investigate the history of the garden and any particular plants that interest you as a starting point for further development of the writing.

Consider some of the ideas from the session on the poetics of situationist derives and see if you can imagine alternate routes through the garden.

Write your way around the garden following some of the following: colour, scale, temperature, weather, light, touch.

Consider the different habitats necessary for plants to grow. What kinds of writing might fit that habitat… i.e. Go to the dry garden and consider what a kind of dry writing might be like! Or do some writing in a hot place (greenhouse) and then go and write in the cold outside – how does it change your writing?

Consider how the  Voicing the garden project could be used as a productive resource for your own writing projects.