Plant Dreaming Deep

After a peripatetic life, forty-five-year-old May Sarton longed to put down roots and found them in New Hampshire in the form of a dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse with good bones . . . It was the realization of a dream that had been a long time coming

In Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton shares an intensely personal account of transforming a house into a home. She begins with an introduction to the enchanting village of Nelson, where she first meets her house. Sarton finds she must “dream the house alive” inside herself before taking the major step of signing the deed. She paints the walls white in order to catch the light and searches for the precise shade of yellow for the kitchen floor. She discovers peace and beauty in solitude, whether she is toiling in the garden or writing at her desk.

This is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life.

This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

“Sensitive, luminous . . . Love is the genius of this small, but tender and often poignant, book by a woman of many insights.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A drama of self-integration . . . An enlarging, enriching and clarifying experience.” —Boston Herald May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award.

An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.