The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan

Liu Zongyuan (773–819), a lesser-known poet of the Tang Dynasty, was a keen gardener and politician who wrote poems about gardening that inhabit a dreamy zone between plant and poem. In “The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan,” translators Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton & Yu Yuanyuan lay out a narrative that takes the reader through the poet’s life, from his exile in Yongzhou, followed by a brief interlude back in Chang’an, before another exile, this time in Liuzhou.

Liu’s gardening rhythms follow his state of mind: an anxious planting pace echoes a season of gloom; he cultivates medicinal plants to ease his afflictions, trekking through difficult terrain to find rare plants, then testing the compatibility of the wild species with the domestic soil in his garden. Liu attends to his plants as if their flourishing could guarantee his own. Rather than ingesting the leaves, he sits near them so his heart can heal in the shade of this strange transposition. In “Planting White Myoga Ginger” he writes:

You only find it on rough and rugged land.
I rely on it for my well-being.
It thrives in an emerald tree’s shade.
Now and then, I glance at my heart’s companion.

The “Tree of Longevity” could provide the poet with reliable walking sticks, but he cannot bear to collect the crop:

Stroking it is enough to forget my fatigue
as, faintly, I feel a spring in my step.
How could I possibly cut it down
and use it to lean on while walking?

These soothing poems also yield a fair bit of intrigue:

A solitary spring, thin and intermittent.
I’ve long given up on scheming,
so why does the elk start from me?

Though Liu’s beloved plants could not last, his poems, a sturdier species, have lived on for over a thousand years.