Let It Grow Wild

Siblings Margaret and Billy Renkl take young readers on a tour of “The Weedy Garden.”

by

Culture

“Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.” — Richard Powers, The Overstory

The snow and ice melt; the cold recedes. Songbirds wake early, singing to greet the gradually lengthening days. Green shoots appear, muscling their way past last year’s dry remains. Bare and scrubby beds wake as living gardens, calling birds to build nests and children to play outside, making memories and mud pies.

Such is the subject of The Weedy Garden (HarperCollins), a brand-new picture book from the brother-and-sister duo of painter Billy Renkl and writer Margaret Renkl, the Nashville-based author of Graceland, At Last and the 2024 Southern Book Prize-winning The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. In their newest collaboration, Billy’s brushes and Margaret’s words lead the reader through a small, slightly unkempt garden, delighting in the natural world right outside the backdoor.

Family Tree

Nature — its proximity, healing powers, and ability to transport — is a steady theme in Margaret’s published work, whether in her columns for The New York Times, her essay collections, or her newest solo book. It’s no surprise that nature found its way, too, into her first foray into the world of children’s literature. Though The Weedy Garden is Margaret’s first book for children, the author has been dreaming of writing such a book since before she could read.

“When my boys were little, my favorite times of day were story-time: books first thing in the morning, books before naptime, books when a kiss on a boo-boo didn’t quite cut it, book after book after book before bed,” Margaret says. “I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been reading and collecting and studying picture books. To have this dream come true at age 64 feels exactly like a miracle.”

Like any good effort of landscaping, The Weedy Garden builds on layers of earlier growth. Billy’s appreciation for the unprepossessing flowers that bloom in the pages of his and his sister’s new book harkens back to his childhood.

“I helped my mom in our yard a lot when I was a kid. Although we grew up in Birmingham, she grew up on a peanut farm in south Alabama. Many of the flowers she grew came from our grandmother’s yard,” Billy says, remembering the hardy, easily divided “passalong plants” grown by his mother and grandmother.

Margaret’s prose begs to be read in a hushed tone, as though the animals she writes about were nearby, and easily spooked. Wonder and whimsy make up the tone of the book, in equal parts, capturing the essence of a childhood spent amid leaves and soil, picking insects off the plants.

The siblings have collaborated on artistic projects like The Weedy Garden since they were both old enough to pick up a pencil, Margaret recalls, with her brother adding his drawings to her poems and stories. “Billy has made artworks for all of my earlier books — internal images, cover images, or both — so in many ways this was just a new manifestation of a longstanding collaboration. And whatever the nature of the artworks he’s making, Billy somehow always manages to take my breath away,” Margaret says.

Though Margaret’s high praise for her brother is not the usual commentary one hears from siblings, it’s clear, both from speaking to the pair and from reading their excellent new book, that the Renkl siblings’ working relationship is characterized more by collaboration than competition. It has served the pair well, as has their shared interest in the natural world, and their childhood experiences playing and helping in gardens.

“For this book, as for our earlier books, I wrote the text first, and then Billy began to work on the images,” she continues, “but he’s not simply ‘illustrating’ my words. He’s responding to the same internal prompt, and in that sense his work is uniquely his own. In The Weedy Garden, I was prompted to write about the wild world I loved as a child. Billy was making art in response to that prompt, too.”

The Product of Their Collaboration

Billy’s illustrations are a riot of colors, from the vibrant hues of purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and zinnias, to the more subdued tones of last year’s fallen leaves, a brown wren scratching in the dirt, and a fuzzy pile of sleeping rabbit kits.

The artist’s brushstrokes complement his sibling’s words with a seeming ease that hints at their long creative collaboration, Billy’s paintings are gallery-quality work. No surprise, then, that the artist’s The Weedy Garden paintings are on view at the David Lusk Gallery’s Nashville location through April 11th. The paintings are lush, as alive with childlike wonder as the next-door nature scenes they depict are alive with the springtime plenty of a thriving ecosystem in a Southern suburban home.

“If you’re a speckled toad, you crouch in stippled soil and dappled leaves,” Margaret writes. “If you’re a green hummingbird, glinting and gleaming in the weedy garden, you dance at the first glad glimpse of trumpet vine. A whirring, twittering dance, right in the glittering air.”

“We were both committed to suggesting that nature is right nearby, that we are a part of it. You don’t need to go to a National Park to be filled with wonder.” — Billy Renkl 

Margaret’s prose begs to be read in a hushed tone, as though the animals she writes about were nearby, and easily spooked. Wonder and whimsy make up the tone of the book, in equal parts, capturing the essence of a childhood spent amid leaves and soil, picking insects off the plants.

A terrapin’s jaws sink into a wild strawberry. A robin perches on a blue bicycle left canted over in the clover and grass. Sunflowers bloom in an explosion of brilliant yellow. Fireflies illuminate the weedy garden at night; by day, goldfinches play hide-and-seek in the black-eyed Susans.

“If you’re a robin, you tilt your head, listening this way, listening that way,” Margaret writes. “Do you hear the earthworm deep in the dark earth, tunneling beneath the weedy roots?”

A reverence for nature is present on every page, as is the conviction that the natural world is accessible all around the reader, wherever they may find themselves.

Nurturing the Nature Next Door

One might wonder, though, why the Renkl siblings’ gardens are so weedy, and indeed this intrepid book reviewer did broach that topic.

“Many of my favorite wildflowers have ‘weed’ built right into their names: ironweed, milkweed, Joe Pye weed, frostweed, and pokeweed, just for starters,” Margaret says. “A garden filled with native wildflowers like these is more than just a source of beauty. It is also a source of sustenance for our wild neighbors.

“In our yard, native plants are eager to help,” Billy says. “Their seeds come in on the wind, or in bird droppings, or on my shoes if I’ve been out walking. The perennials put themselves to bed in the fall and wake up in the spring in time to feed the pollinators. I think of ‘weedy’ as naming an aesthetic — along the lines of ‘comfortable’ or ‘honest.’”

“No matter how big or how small our garden plots,” Margaret adds, “we can use the soil in our care for good by recognizing it as crucial habitat for the creatures who share our ecosystem.”

The trees overhanging North Parkway offer more than shade to drivers; they’re the homes and foraging grounds of birds and squirrels and insects. A tangle of wildflowers may look cluttered to a human eye, but it’s an oasis to a pollinator flying through a desert of concrete, steel, and asphalt.

“We were both committed to suggesting that nature is right nearby, that we are a part of it. You don’t need to go to a National Park to be filled with wonder,” Billy says. “The backyard will do, or a park, or the edges of the parking lot behind your apartment. Native wildflowers will poke up through the cracks in the sidewalk if you let them.”