Watts in Elsa's Garden

The Ecology of Alan Watts' Psychedelic Writing

‘What an adventure in alchemy!’[i] Alan Watts wrote to author Henry Miller in 1959. LSD was fast transcending the sphere of medicine and entering the trend-setting world of the fashionable and bohemian in late 1950s California. Watts, an Englishman who first moved to the US in 1938, lived in the vicinity of one such bohemian enclave; Druid Heights. It was a setting and a culture that had a profound impact on his writings—not least as a garden ecology.

In my previous article, I looked at how psychedelics slowly edged out of the clinical setting and into garden spaces. As a literary motif, the garden provided a transitive place in which beglamoured experimenters traversed private and public distinctions and the myth of separation. Within a few years those characteristics of the High Garden were informed and shaped by an emerging ecological consciousness—beautifully formulated, as we shall see, by Watts.

The aim of the present article is two-fold. On one hand, I will illustrate how the garden is depicted by Watts as a kind of deep ecology, a psychospiritual matrix of inextricable relationships in the natural world in which co-creative patterns are paramount. On the other, I’ll ground Watts’ psychedelic writings in his world more specifically—his High Garden was not only an idealized literary motif, but the result of his own personal relationships.

An Ecological Playground

The philosopher and intellectual Alan Watts embarked on his psychedelic adventures in 1958. Keith Ditman at UCLA facilitated his first LSD experiment, and Watts had what he described in a radio broadcast as a thoroughly ‘aesthetic’ experience, without much religious content.[ii] A spiritual raconteur, and friend of Aldous Huxley, this wasn’t exactly what he’d expected—hoping instead that he might find a touch of the divine.

However, when Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron at the Langley Porter Clinic, in San Francisco, heard this, they suggested he came and tried again. On those occasions, often in the comfortable setting of a home, he began to appreciate the mystical quality that might be aroused by psychedelics. Later, the two doctors even provided Watts with his own supply of mescaline and other drugs to play with.[iii]

On December 11th 1960, he also tried psilocybin, provided for him by Timothy Leary. In a letter, he noted the setting was ideal, ‘spending the day in a kind of earthly paradise owned by some very dear friends, all of whom have experienced LSD’.[iv] Mostly spent indoors, he did briefly sit in the garden drinking wine and eating home-made bread. His friends even thought he smelt ‘mushroomy’, and he found it easier to relate to people than with LSD.

This pattern of experimentation is central to understanding Watts’ psychedelic writings. There is an interaction between the domestic and garden space that provides the basic framework of his setting. Within this, there are playful, intellectual relationships colouring the fabric of an emerging ecological outlook. And the boho background of his milieu – about which more will be discussed shortly – centred the notion of co-creativity.

In ‘The New Alchemy’, his first essay on the topic, Watts argued psychedelics were primarily useful as instruments for creativity in the arts and sciences, and only secondarily for therapy. He wrote: ‘…the human and natural environment in which these experiments are conducted is of great importance, and that its use in hospital wards with groups of doctors firing off clinical questions at the subject is most undesirable’.[v]

Watts exalted the High Garden. He recalled one LSD experiment in which he was left alone outside and gazed at ‘a lawn surrounded by shrubs and high trees—pine and eucalyptus—and floodlit from the house which enclosed it on one side.’[vi] He first noticed that rough patches of the lawn, where the grass was thin and mottled with weeds, no longer felt like blemishes as they had before. The vista wrapped itself into a complete pattern.

He saw an ‘ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvet damask’. In delight he stood up and danced upon ‘this enchanted carpet’, feeling connected with the earth, and the trees and the sky. The botanical elements became ‘living jewelry’  with ‘intricate structures… and yet breathing and flowing with the same life that was in me’. He recalled:

Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated from the many branches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the leaves, and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new bursting of growth from the centre repeated and amplified the basic design with increasing complexity and delight, finally exulting in a flower.[vii]

LSD’s major feature, he suggested, is that one appreciates that events happen for their own sake, and that this leads to the conclusion that we each live in a world of actions rather than agents—playful, musical and dance-like. Discerning the character of the dancing pattern between himself and the garden, Watts described it as a ‘love-play’; a mutually evolving transaction.

The basic principal of ecology, in which objects cannot be understood in isolation, was revealed experientially to Watts via psychedelics. In itself, this was a beautiful revelation, however, its shadow side was a kind of spiritual impoverishment that pervaded the everyday world of wider society:

Our neglect of and repression of this interrelationship gives special urgency to all the new sciences of ecology, studying the interplay of organisms with their environments, and warning us against ignorant interference with the balance of nature.[viii]

Watts’ essay suggests that not only should psychedelic researchers spend more time examining the question of setting, but that the High Garden was chiefly characterized by ecological experience. For him, the High Garden was a playground—a liminal space that blurred the imagined boundary between what is human and what is nature, revealing a plethora of near indistinguishable, co-creative relationships.

As with so much trip-lit, Watts’ packaged his personal experiences in far grander social, even global, questions, in this case around ecology and our relationship with the world. However, while this recognition might have sprung spontaneously, it was no mere coincidence. Watts’ ecological High Garden was already his everyday world; it was his small, Californian community.

The Gardens of Elsa Gidlow

Watts’ parents brought him up in the Garden of England; the county of Kent. They had a large garden that grew semi-wild in places, and he explored it as a child as if in a jungle with flowering weeds growing above his head. He never understood why some people insisted on billiard table lawns. And, as he later admitted in his autobiography, while he was no gardener himself, he had always loved flowers and fruit.

Those early garden influences, however, were as nothing compared to those occasioned by his friend, or affectionately described ‘adopted sister’, Elsa Gidlow. An English-born poet, Gidlow lived a remarkable life and I highly recommend reading her autobiography, Elsa I Come with my Songs (1986). A self-described anarchist, a lesbian with a skill for erotic poetry, and a bohemian ritualist, she early embodied late 20th century trends in counterculture. 

What’s more, wrote Watts, ‘Elsa invariably goeswith a garden’.[ix] And by ‘goeswith’ he meant ‘the inseparable relationship which lies between different aspects of the same thing or process’. In other words, Gidlow and the garden were on a kind of continuum that defined one another. Watts, I would argue, is himself part of this continuum, as are his psychedelic writings—her gardens were his literal and metaphorical context.

In the 1940s Elsa bought a dilapidated house she named ‘Madrona’ in Fairfax, California. After an extraordinary hearth ritual, she slowly rebuilt the house, and later reflected,

Can anything repair the spirit like co-operating with the earth to make a garden? Gardening is perhaps not the word for what was appropriate at Madrona. The wild hillside with some terracing and rough paths told me that non-native flowers planted there might not be welcome.[x]

Not wishing to simply stamp herself on the place, Elsa co-created it. The hill had long been ‘healed’ by the mosses, ferns, wild flowers and bracken, so she simply cleared away the overgrown grasses to provide space, and bolstered the hill—which had a beauty, she believed, that defied any imposition of her own will. She planted fuchsias and rock plants in the gaps. It was not a garden, but ‘a partnership between myself and nature’.

This kind of partnership, a dance-partnership if you will, was a key aspect in Watts’ High Garden. Elsa first heard Watts waxing lyrical on KPFA radio and learnt that he gave a class at the American Academy of Asian Studies. After enrolling, they became close friends, and Gidlow invited Watts and family to visit herself and her lover Isabel for a 4th of July party at Madrona—in a striking co-incidence, Watts’ mother had taught Isabel at a school in Kent!

Both Isabel and Elsa loved plants and used to buy new succulents for their garden, or fuchsia varieties for Isabel’s collection. However, their time at Madrona was coming to an end by 1953/54. Elsa realized, ‘it was inadequate for the dream that had been growing in me of wilder community, a larger garden, where vegetables as well as flowers could be grown to help feed us—a place for the growth of a spirit.’[xi]

Her dream of a ‘wilder community’ came to fruition when she partnered up with the carpenter - and Frank Lloyd Wright inspired architect - Roger Somer and his wife Mary. They purchased a five acre piece of land, which became known as Druid Heights—a name inspired by Elsa’s Irish friend and mentor, the poet and Celtic mythologist Ella Young, plus Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She did, however, keep Madrona and rented it to friends, including Watts.

Druid Heights was just over four miles outside the nearest town of Mill Valley (where Watts moved in 1953). It was ringed by fifty-foot eucalyptus trees that were planted by the previous owner as windbreaks. The road to the property went through oak and bay laurel woods, and by the end of driving up the lane for the first time, Elsa knew the space was waiting for her. She soon went about co-creating its gardens.

She started by clearing weed and blackberry jungles, then terracing and rock work to make beds, before composting and soil-making. After learning to deal with an earwig infestation that killed their seedlings, she developed a poison-free, organic garden in which ‘no poisons, pesticides or chemical fertilizers are used.’[xii] They grew vegetables, salads, scented flowers, numerous herbs and catnip ‘to enspirit the cats before they start on gopher-hunting forays.’[xiii]

The gardens at Druid Heights, and the way in which they were tended, developed and understood, does not seem especially strange today. Growing organic, wilding, and creating in tandem with nature, have since become widespread ideals, increasingly practiced and widely discussed. Then, however, it was on the radical, bohemian fringes, before moving, as radical ideas often do, to the centre of fashionable life.

A Garden of Eden

Watts was enamoured by his ‘adopted sister’ and particularly her green fingers, and he was unequivocal about what was being created at Druid Heights: ‘With her skill as a gardener and his [Somer] as an architect they transformed this area into a paradise, a Garden of Eden…’[xiv] And in the great utopian tradition of building New Jerusalem:

She made a central patio of sundecks sliding into a courtyard with flowers and cactus plants and a lemon tree and many kinds of fuchsias and strange little lantern flowers with pointed caps like Tibetan lamas, and encircled all this with a kitchen garden of beans and lettuce, cabbages and strawberries, and New Zealand spinach.[xv]

This Garden of Eden was also a place to dwell and trip. They undertook rituals with LSD, which Watts had indirectly sourced from Sandoz. Telephones were disconnected, they fasted for 24 hours, and then took LSD in the morning. Talk between friends, Elsa reported, were revelatory, ‘It can be delightful foolishness untranslatable to common sense, yet significant as the interplay of instruments in a musical duet or symphony.’[xvi]

We are accustomed to thinking about Alan Watts in regard to his knowledge of religion, particularly Zen, and his understanding of psychotherapy. An eloquent speaker who communicated complex ideas through simplified lenses, his influence on thinkers who came after him is undoubtedly even greater than we realise. Yet, Watts’ High Garden was a very local affair.

So profound an influence was the combination of Elsa, her garden, and their trips together, on Watts, that he dedicated The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) to ‘the people of Druid Heights’. Indeed, he also wrote the book (and other titles) while renting Madrona from her. As such, his everyday life, as much as his thinking and writing, was shaped by the Edenic ecology of Druid Heights.

Watts’ trips were undertaken within the early rumblings of a localized, ecological consciousness—one imbued with a comfortable, bohemian worldview, yet derived in part from a close proximity to wilderness at the Druid Heights community. The ecological ideas found in Watts’ psychedelic writings continued to evolve, and in my next article I will look more closely at how that manifests as an eco-spirituality in The Joyous Cosmology.

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[i] Watts J & Watts A (2017) The Collected Letters of Alan Watts. Novato: New World Library. 360

[ii] Watts, Alan (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965. New York: Pantheon Books. 342-345

[iii] Watts 2017: 351

[iv] Ibid. 390

[v] Watts, Alan (1978 [1958/60]) ‘The New Alchemy’ in This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience. London: Rider & Co. 133

[vi] Ibid. 143

[vii] Ibid. 144

[viii] Ibid. 139

[ix] Watts 1972: 282

[x] Gidlow, Elsa (1986) Elsa I come with my Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow. San Francisco: Booklegger Press. 294

[xi] Ibid. 342

[xii] Ibid. 350

[xiii] Ibid. 354

[xiv] Watts 1972: 283-284

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Gidlow 1986: 366