Sandra Knauf has worn many hats in her garden writing career—she’s been a “Colorado Voices” columnist for The Denver Post and her work has appeared nationally in publications that include GreenPrints and Mary Janes Farm; she’s shared her work locally here on USR and on Colorado Springs’s NPR affiliate radio station KRCC. In 2011, she started her own publishing company, Greenwoman Publishing, and has since published six issues of a literary garden writing journal (Greenwoman Volumes 1-6), a YA sci-fi fantasy novel (Zera and the Green Man), and an anthology of sexy gardening stories that she describes as a “feminist/gardener’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey” (Fifty Shades of Green).
Her most recent endeavor is a bold, original, and often hilarious take on the gardening memoir. Please Don’t Piss on the Petunias: Raising Kids, Crops, and Critters in the City covers the time that Knauf went from a wide-eyed dreamer and new mother longing for a garden (in her late twenties) through learning everything she could about green living over the next two decades while at the same time adopting a lot of pets. As the title notes, her adventures were family-style and included two kids and a partner who was often reluctant when it came to her schemes and dreams.
Here in an interview with Sandra, we ask her about her new book, gardening, and the art of writing.
USR: Among other things, “Mistress Gardeners” details your experience in the CSU Master Gardener program. As such, it demonstrates your extraordinary breadth of knowledge as a gardener and environmentalist. At one point in the essay, you mention how the experience honed your philosophy of gardening, to include some subversive ways of knowing. How did this journey of discovery help shape who you are now?
SK: The first thing I learned right away was that the individuals who were drawn to an education in horticulture were, by and large, women. That was a surprise because in the late 1990s we were programmed to think men dominated this field completely. I also discovered that what we were being taught had a lot to do with the industry—for example, we were required to learn about turf, even though about 90% of us had little to no interest in turf, and we were schooled on chemical controls even though most of us expressed a preference for organic gardening. The experience opened up an awareness, which grew, on how industry and our higher education system were working together for the benefit of industry. Another example is that back then, CSU promoted Roundup as something of a miracle weed killer. This experience made me question mainstream information from then on.
USR: Your book is as much a family memory album as anything. How have Andy, Zora, and Lily responded to its publication? For that matter, have you encountered any interesting responses from others mentioned in the book? How does all of this make you feel?
SK: Lily, our younger daughter, is the one who encouraged me to gather these essays together in a book. Both she and her sister Zora grew up with their mother as a writer, and they’ve been part of the process, not only as subject matter, but, as they grew older, editors. Both are talented storytellers and editors. They’re not shy about telling me when they think I got something wrong, or if I need to finesse or delete a scene (or even a whole story). Andy, over twenty-some years, has grown used to seeing himself in my stories, even while, at the same time, I know it hasn’t been always comfortable for him to see his life told from my point of view. In print! I’m grateful to have a partner who has this level of respect and trust for me and my work.
USR: “Garden Goddess for Hire” reads very much like a sequence of journal entries, yet it’s infused with powerful strains of social satire. It also explains in thorough, graphic detail why you moved away from professional gardening. Is there anything you would like to say to those currently working in the field, or anyone considering entering it?
SK: I would like to say, “Professional gardeners, I love you!” Gardening for a living is not only hard labor—and dirty labor, literally—it’s also, for some, a calling, an art form, and a spiritual practice. There’s a special place in my heart for those who devote their lives to this work.
USR: “Love & Roses” is some of your most sophisticated, elegant writing. It’s a brilliant blend of prosaic marital challenges and the application of gardening to sublimate anger into a sense of transcendent overcoming. Was this a more challenging writing for you, or did if flow readily from your imagination?
SK: Why, thank you, Eric! That story definitely flowed. I naturally daydream and make associations when I’m caught up in gardening. On that day, after a fight with Andy and working out in the garden pruning roses, and getting all scratched up in the process, the daydreams flowed. Later, I basically just transcribed what I thought about as I worked. And I have to give some credit to the roses, who provided me with the perfect metaphor for love!
USR: Please Don’t Piss on the Petunias traces the arc of your life in often brutally honest terms. For instance, “Stove Love” and “Stove Love—Part II” define emotional change over the years through your altered impressions of the stoves you’ve owned. How have you come to terms with this melancholy yet hopeful transformation?
SK: Like all things, the sadness that you speak of, in this case, the one of “empty nest syndrome,” passes. By the end of this period, I came to the realization that being the mother of two daughters has been the most joyful part of my existence. There was so much play, teaching, learning, and pure pleasure that came from allowing myself to indulge in a life of my choosing—filled with plants and animals and giving my daughters the childhood I dreamed of as a child.
Women grapple, a lot, with their feelings about motherhood and career and what society tells them they should be doing at every single point in their lives. We’ve all been poisoned with the lie that we can do it all, and have it all, all at once. The truth is we can’t bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, tend to the children, have a great romantic life, AND keep our sanity.
The pain we’re experiencing now as a culture is due, to a great extent, to buying into lies that profited industry more than anything else. We’ve been blaming one another as we strive for needed equality, instead of getting together, realizing and respecting the fact that we’re all unique individuals with our own talents and desires (which may include having a family or not), and having conversations about what works, what doesn’t work, and what we need to do now to create a better life for everyone. Because we are all in this together.
USR: You avoid pretention and traditional bromides at every turn in your memoir. This makes for a meaningful reading experience. Did you find it a challenge to lay your life so bare, at times, in the text you wrote?
SK: Yes and no. No, in that I’m one of those people who finds it almost impossible to lie or to sugar-coat. Yes, in that I’ve felt the discomfort socially in regard to my point of view and my honesty in expressing it. Years ago, I was at a store and a friend came up and commented, “I was at a party last night and your name came up. We were talking about a story you read on the radio. You’re notorious!” I couldn’t believe it—notorious? Me? I was just a mom who gardened and wrote stories about nature! I asked her if notorious was the right word and she assured me it was.
The story she was referring to was about sexual diversity in the animal kingdom. It was a story that was 100% factual, but there was some naughtiness, I’ll admit, in my story. I mentioned that in honeybee society everything was run by females and the only role that males played was sex-in-the-sky with the queen, who I called “single mother of thousands.” I gleefully explained that after sex with “queenie” the drones lost their penises and fell to their deaths. I was telling the story how I wanted to tell it, and I was labeled as “notorious.”
I worried about that label for a while. I’ve also been painfully honest about a few troubles we go through in married life, and that’s been challenging. But, in the end, telling the truth is freeing. Often I think of that quote from Stephen King: “If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” I made my peace with that—I’d never be a member of “polite society.” The good thing is that I never cared much about polite society in the first place!
USR: You describe nature and our connection to it as highly erotic at times. “Romancing the Seed” certainly comes to mind in this regard. Any thoughts?
SK: Nature IS erotic. Gardening is wildly erotic. Gardeners obsess over flowers, which are the gorgeous sex organs of plants. A lot of effort goes into a plant breeder’s work, making those sex organs bigger, creating different colors and shapes, and then, if the breeder succeeds in creating something new, he or she often wants to give that new variety a seductive name. There’s a reason why we have roses named “Elizabeth Taylor” and “Marilyn Monroe.” Gardening and connecting with nature is operating, on a big level, with our senses. That’s primal and it’s sexy.
USR: Do you see nature as a particular gender, and has this changed for you over time?
SK: I see Nature as both genders. I know the popular answer might be that Nature is female, “Mother Nature” and all, and there is a nurturing and fecundity about the Earth that is most definitely female. Nature feeds us, almost like a mother feeds her baby with her breasts. Nature can heal us, nourish us, and it can protect us (providing shelter and warmth), but it can also kill us—for example, poisonous plants or forest fires, floods, hurricanes.
You can’t have the wildness, the diversity, the sex, the LIFE, without both male and female energy! In Celtic pagan tradition, the oak tree is masculine, water is female. Both are powerful and work together. One of the things that captured my attention, early on, almost immediately after I became a certified master gardener, was the “green man”—this man/plant face that you find in European cathedrals. I was so intrigued by this figure. After doing some research, I discovered that the green man was an ancient symbol of humankind’s connection to Nature—it’s an archetype that’s represented through human history and in all cultures—for example, Osiris in Egyptian mythology was a green man, a symbol of resurrection. Christ is also a “green man” of sorts as he is resurrected.
In western culture over the last two thousand years, the green man has been portrayed as male. I saw it as yet another symbol of power that men claimed for themselves. The world is in a bad place environmentally, and I think much of the blame goes not only to greed, but this imbalance between the sexes. The human connection to Nature is an area that desperately needs healing, and we can only do that with the energies of both men and women working together.
USR: What else would you like to share with our readers?
SK: My life’s passion is to try to turn people on to Nature and gardening through writing and art; to ignite their curiosity, to inspire them to go out and get their hands in the soil; to touch, smell, hear, see, FEEL. I want to make them laugh, to cry, to see the wonder I see in the natural world around us. I hope that my stories can do that, on some level.
