Reflections of a gardener called Samuel Beckett

When Becket became successful he built a house in the French countryside where he would often reflect on his gardening

'I keep an eye on the love-life of the Colorado beetle and work against it, successfully but humanely, that is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbour’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!

I scratch the mud and observe the worms, an observation entirely devoid of scientific detachment. I try not to hurt them with the spade. All the while knowing that, cut in two, they at once fashion a new head, or a new tail, whichever is the case.'

All my trees are down in the cold ground where I shudder to think what is happening to their roots.

Beckett, disgusted as he often was is by his inability to achieve the writing goal he has set himself, was to retreat to the country side in order to sink into the soil of Ussy-sur-Marne. ‘I ask for nothing more,’ he writes to Georges Belmont in September 1951, ‘than to be able to bury myself in this beetroot-growing hole, scratch the earth and howl at the clouds.  How Lear like is this?

Beckett's view on his gardening might be a good corollary for our failure to understand his writing
Beckett remarks with an insight worthy or a contemporary neurologist, ‘what are called outside and inside are one and the same,’ each bringing the other into cognitive existence.