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 gar…