On Swamps, Invisible Gardens, and the Problem of Too Much

We met in a greenhouse that was no longer a greenhouse, because everything in it had died six months ago and been replaced by something worse: a kind of furry mold that grew in spirals on the glass and smelled faintly of bread. Russell had chosen the location. She said she liked the light, which came through the mold-patterns in a greenish wash that made everyone look like they were at the bottom of a pond. Calvino was already seated when I arrived, on an overturned terra-cotta pot, his legs crossed at the ankle, reading from a small notebook. He did not look up.

“I want to talk about surfaces,” Russell said, before I had even sat down. She was standing by a planting table covered in what I think was lichen. “Not metaphorically. I mean the actual texture of things that shouldn’t be growing. Have you ever touched kudzu? Real kudzu, not the idea of it. It’s got this fine hair on the underside of the leaf, and when it’s growing over a car it almost looks tender, like it’s trying to keep the car warm. The car is dead. The kudzu doesn’t care. But it looks like care.”

“You are already in the sensory,” Calvino said, still not looking up. “You have started with your hands.”

“Where else would I start?”

“With the architecture.” He closed his notebook. “We have been given a woman — let us say a woman — who can make things grow. On asphalt. On drywall. On her own skin. This is a structural premise, not a sensory one. The question is not what the growing feels like. The question is what shape the story takes when the growing cannot be stopped.”

I said that maybe both questions mattered. Russell gave me a look that was not unkind but was definitely the look you give a student who has said something true and unhelpful.

“Both questions always matter,” she said. “That’s not a position. Tell me which one you’d write first.”

I admitted I didn’t know yet. That was why we were here.

“Good,” Calvino said. “Not knowing is the only honest starting position. But I will tell you what I know. I know that a story about abundance — about someone who produces too much, who cannot stop producing — is not a story about the thing produced. It is a story about the world that receives it. Kafka understood this. When Gregor Samsa becomes an insect, the novella is not about entomology. It is about the apartment. The family. The charwoman.”

“Sure,” Russell said. “But Kafka also makes you feel the shell. The legs. The apple stuck in his back, rotting. You feel the bug-ness. If you skip the bug-ness, you’ve got a parable, not a story.”

Calvino tilted his head. “I have nothing against parables.”

“I know you don’t. That’s what worries me.”

There was a silence. The mold on the greenhouse glass shifted in a breeze I couldn’t feel — or maybe it was growing, incrementally, in real time. Russell picked at the lichen on the table and a small piece came off under her thumbnail.

“Let me say what I think the risk is,” she said. “With a character who can grow gardens anywhere. The risk is that it’s beautiful. That’s the trap. You describe the morning glories coming up through the cracks in the bathroom tile, and the wisteria wrapping around the staircase banister, and the reader goes: oh, how lovely, a magical gift. And then you’ve written a story about a woman with a beautiful power and the only question is whether she learns to accept it.”

“That is a terrible story,” Calvino agreed.

“So the growth has to be wrong,” Russell continued. “Not morally wrong. Materially wrong. It has to smell. It has to buckle the floor. The roots have to crack the foundation and the plumber has to come and you have to hear him on the phone with his wife saying he’s never seen anything like this and he’s lying because what he’s actually seen is something that frightens him. The impossibility has to be — inconvenient. Wet. Structural.”

I asked whether that meant the story needed to be a horror story.

“No,” Russell said immediately. “Absolutely not. Horror means the impossibility is a threat. I’m talking about the impossibility being a fact. A stubborn, physical, annoying fact. Like a body. Your body does things you didn’t ask it to do. It sweats and bleeds and grows hair in places you didn’t want hair. This woman’s gift should feel like that — like a body doing something it can’t help doing.”

Calvino uncrossed his ankles and recrossed them the other direction. “I have a different concern,” he said. “You are thinking about the physical reality of the growth. I am thinking about the catalogue. This woman — she must be a kind of archivist of her own condition. She must keep records. Not because she is scientific, necessarily, but because the only way to comprehend infinity is to number it. Marco Polo numbers the cities. Piranesi — the character, not the artist — numbers the statues, the halls, the tides. Numbering is how a person alone in an impossible place keeps from going mad.”

“Or it’s how they go mad slowly,” Russell said. “In an organized fashion.”

“Yes. Both.” Calvino allowed himself a slight smile. “But the catalogue is important because it creates structure. And structure — in a story about uncontrollable growth — is the only counterforce. The growth wants to be infinite. The catalogue insists on the finite. Each entry says: I saw this, I noted this, I gave this a name and a number. The tension between the infinite growth and the finite catalogue — that is where the story lives.”

I said I thought we might be talking about two different stories. Russell’s story was about the body — the physical, uncomfortable reality of a gift that won’t stop giving. Calvino’s story was about the mind — the architectural response to abundance, the ordering impulse. Could we have both?

“You can always have both,” Russell said. “That’s the easy answer. The hard answer is: which one wins? In Kafka, the body wins. Gregor dies. The family sweeps up. In Piranesi, the mind wins — the catalogues are what save him, the records are what eventually reveal the truth of his imprisonment. So which is it? Does our woman drown in her own garden, or does she catalogue her way to understanding?”

“Neither,” Calvino said quietly. “She catalogues and drowns simultaneously. That is what I would write.”

“That’s interesting,” Russell said, and I could tell from her voice that she meant it, which is different from the way people usually say it. “The journals getting overgrown. The lists with roots growing through the pages. The categories breaking down because the garden keeps inventing new categories.”

“Precisely. And the multiple voices — we have been told we must use multiple voices. This is not a problem. This is a gift. Because a person who is both cataloguer and garden cannot be narrated by one voice. The cataloguer’s voice is precise, orderly, numbered. The garden’s — or the body’s — voice is something else. Sensory. Uncontrolled. And then there must be a third voice. Someone outside.”

“A neighbor,” Russell said. “Or a city inspector. Someone who has to deal with the practical consequences. Someone who’s getting calls.”

“Not a neighbor,” Calvino said. “A sister. Someone who remembers her before the growing started. Someone who can testify to what was lost — or not lost. Perhaps the sister is not sure anything was lost. Perhaps the sister is envious.”

I said the sister was interesting because she introduced the question of whether the gift was actually a gift. If even the people who love you aren’t sure whether to pity you or envy you, then the story can’t settle into a single emotional register.

“I don’t want the story to settle,” Russell said. “I want it to keep growing. I want the last page to be — not unfinished, but still producing. Still leafing.”

“A story that ends while still growing is a story about mortality,” Calvino said. “Because the reader knows what the character does not: that the page will end. The growth will be cut off — not by the character’s will, not by resolution, but by the edge of the paper.”

“That’s morbid,” Russell said.

“It is precise.”

“Morbid and precise aren’t mutually exclusive. I would know.” She was pulling lichen off the table now in longer strips, like she was peeling a sunburn. “All right. So we have a woman who grows things from any surface. She keeps catalogues — inventories, lists, pressed specimens. The catalogues themselves get overgrown. Her sister watches from outside, remembering and not-remembering. And the story is told in three voices: the cataloguer, the sister, and — what? The growth itself?”

“Not the growth itself,” Calvino said. “That would be too neat. An allegory with its own voice. No. The third voice should be — I am trying to find the word — an address. A voice that speaks to the reader directly, or to no one. A voice that is not sure who it is addressing. The voice of the condition itself, but not personified. The voice of what it is like to be both the garden and the gardener.”

“A second-person aside?” I suggested.

“Not second person. That is a trick. I mean something more like — the voice of a field guide. An entry in a naturalist’s notebook. ‘This species was first observed in domestic settings. It colonizes plaster and human keratin with equal facility. Its flowering season is continuous.’ A voice that describes the woman from the outside, as if she were a phenomenon. A species.”

Russell was quiet for a moment. She had stopped pulling lichen. “I like that,” she said. “The field-guide voice. Because it does something the other two voices can’t — it makes the woman into an object of study. Which is cruel, in a way. And accurate.”

“Cruelty and accuracy are old companions in literature,” Calvino said.

“In literature and in Florida,” Russell said.

I asked about the ending. How does a story about uncontrollable growth end?

“It doesn’t,” Russell said. “We just said this.”

“It doesn’t end,” Calvino agreed. “But it stops. These are different things. A clock that runs down does not end. It stops. The spring is still coiled. There is still potential energy. The hands simply no longer move.”

“So the inventories stop,” I said. “The cataloguing stops. But the growth continues.”

“Yes,” Calvino said. “And the reader must imagine the growth continuing beyond the last page. Which means the story succeeds only if the reader cannot stop thinking about it. If they look at a crack in their own wall and, for one moment, expect to see a tendril.”

Russell smiled. It was the first time she had smiled. “Now you’re talking about haunting. And haunting is my department.”

“I thought your department was swamps.”

“Swamps are haunted. Everything in Florida is haunted. The shopping malls. The golf courses. The drainage ditches. Haunted by what they used to be. A parking lot in Florida is haunted by the Everglades. That’s what our character is — she’s haunted by the possibility of growth. She can’t look at a parking lot without seeing a meadow. She can’t touch a wall without leaving seeds.”

Calvino opened his notebook again and wrote something in it. He did not share what he wrote.

“I want the sister’s sections to be the most human,” Russell said, shifting. “The most — I hate this word, but — relatable. The sister calls about rent. The sister brings groceries and finds them already sprouting in the bags. The sister is the one who has to lie to the landlord. The sister holds the story in the world of consequences.”

“And the cataloguer holds it in the world of wonder,” Calvino said.

“And the field-guide entries hold it nowhere,” I said. “They just describe. Without wonder, without consequence.”

“Without affect,” Calvino corrected. “That is the word. Without affect. And the absence of affect, positioned between wonder and consequence, will be the most disturbing voice of all. Because it suggests that the condition is — normal. Observable. Part of the natural order. Which is exactly what makes it unbearable.”

Russell stood up and brushed lichen dust off her hands. “We should stop before we plan too much,” she said. “I can already feel the story calcifying into an outline, and outlines are death.”

“Outlines are not death,” Calvino said. “They are skeletons. Death is flesh without bones.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It is structural.”

“Same thing,” Russell said, and walked toward the greenhouse door, which no longer opened because something had grown into the hinges. She pushed it with her shoulder, and it gave, and a smell came through from outside that was green and complicated, the smell of things growing whether anyone wanted them to or not.

Calvino stayed on his terra-cotta pot. He was writing in his notebook again.

I remained between them, which felt, I realize now, exactly right.