Vicky Morris

During chemotherapy, my garden had the best summer it’s ever had. Because I wasn't working, I spent my days tending it, and it answered with abundance. Every plant seemed to pulse with growth and vitality.

Going through treatment and being so connected to the garden at this time made me acutely aware of unseen biological worlds, both within me and in the soil I worked. I had to wear gloves and protect my ‘sun-shy baby skin’. Chemotherapy works by targeting fast-dividing cells. In doing so, it also lowers the immune system and can't distinguish between cancer cells and other healthy fast-dividing cells, so hair and nails become part of the loss too.

What fascinated me was how quickly the language of gardening and illness began to overlap. In one world I was celebrating growth, new shoots and abundance. In the other, growth had become something to fear. The bindweed, with its relentless instinct to spread, also became both an invasive part of tending the garden and a reality within myself that I was mentally struggling with.

It made me think about how something as miraculous as growth can, in a different context, become something frightening, and how nature offers us both healing and harm without recognizing the distinction.

My poem “Garden”  ends with me making a bird's nest from my hair. For me, that felt like a small act of return: even in the losses of treatment, nature was still finding a use for what I could no longer keep.