On the second day of spring, Debbie Millman was happy to report that her hydrangea are in bloom and saw tiny buds emerge from her peonies.
“In New York, I have a very small garden,” says Millman from her office at the School of Visual Arts, where she runs the master’s program in branding. “Not even a garden.” In fact, she clarifies, Millman has some container plants on a Juliet balcony, a small assortment of greenery in front of her brownstone, a birch tree in the back and the hydrangea in a deck off her kitchen.
Millman is an accomplished, and award-winning, author, illustrator and graphic designer, as well as the host of the long-running podcast, “Design Matters.” Gardening, she admits, isn’t exactly her strength, although her attempts inspired her latest book, “Love Letter to a Garden.”
“I’m not entirely sure I’m good at it yet,” Millman says of gardening with a chuckle. “I’m definitely better, but I would hardly say that I am good.”
Millman never intended to write a book about gardens. During COVID, she and her wife, Roxane Gay, were in Los Angeles, where they split their time, and Millman took on some home gardening projects, the results of which she posted as visual essays on Instagram. Then when her contacts at the TED conference asked if she could create some interstitials for that year’s online event, she made one about gardening. “I was experimenting in doing a lot with various plants and vegetables for the first time in my life and berries for the first time in my life, so I was writing about all this,” she says.
Based on this, as well as a visual story she created about her trip to Antarctica, an editor approached Millman to write and illustrate a book about gardens in a similar style. “I wrote back to her and said, If you’re looking for a book on how to garden, I’m not your girl,” Millman recalls. “Most of what I’ve done over the years has resulted in failure. I’ve had a little bit of success in Los Angeles and have learned a bit more about city gardening over the years, but any real gardener would think this is a joke.”
Millman offered an alternative, though. She could write about the “quest” to become a better gardener.
In “Love Letter to a Garden,” Millman trails her personal relationship to flora. She’s a native New Yorker and was introduced to gardens through her grandmother in Brooklyn. Many years later, Millman received some tips from her neighbor and friend, Maria, to whom the book is dedicated. When Maria died in 2019, Millman replanted her late friend’s rhododendron in her own garden. “That should be beginning to wake up as well,” Millman says.
After the move to Los Angeles during the pandemic, Millman turned to her cousin in Northern California, Eileen, for advice, which explains why she has so much documentation of her struggles in gardening. “I would send her a picture of a leaf or a bud that wasn’t growing the way that I thought it should or there was some fungus or mold, mildew, bugs,” says Millman. “I would show her pictures of these things and say, ‘Do you know what this is? ‘”
A distinctive feature of Millman’s visual stories is her handwriting. “Quite a lot of people over the years have asked me if it’s a font or if I would make it a font,” she says. “It’s not a font. Everything is hand-drawn. I likely wouldn’t make it a font because I wouldn’t want something that looked like mine that wasn’t.”
The personal touch in “Love Letter to a Garden” is important to Millman, but this is more a matter of making the work recognizably hers than an exercise in branding, she says.
“I think that people who try to aspire to be brands lose a lot of the messiness and abstractness and growth that comes from being a human,” says Millman. “Brands are manufactured meaning and humans evolve and I think that there’s a big difference, so I would hate to think that there was any real branding methodology embedded in this book beyond my typography.”
“Love Letter to a Garden” also includes recipes from Gay. “I’m not a particularly good cook, but Roxanne is a great cook and makes a killer salad dressing,” says Millman. “The very first time that we made a salad from everything that I had grown was revelatory to both of us. That’s why I took that picture of that salad, because it was incomprehensible. It was like magic that we were able to conjure this from the ground.”
Millman’s favorite recipe in the book is the Strawberry Tall Cake. “It’s Roxanne’s riff on a strawberry shortcake, but more is more in my world,” she says.
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