Lorna Crozier reflects on her relationship with Patrick Lane in Through the Garden

Through the Garden by Lorna Crozier is a finalist for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 18, 2020.

Crozier is one of Canada's most beloved and accomplished poets, as was her long-time partner, Patrick Lane. They met in 1976 and built a life together, publishing more than 40 books between them along the way. But in 2017, Lane became ill and their life changed forever, and eventually Lane died in 2019. Crozier writes about their relationship, their personal and creative partnership, and comes to terms with her grief, in the memoir Through the Garden.

• How writing a memoir helped celebrated poet Lorna Crozier cope with the loss of a beloved partner

Crozier's poetry collections include The House the Spirit Builds, God of Shadows and What the Soul Doesn't Want.

Read an excerpt from Through the Garden below.

Directly across the road from our driveway is Coles Bay park. Close to nine acres, it's a stand of trees growing on two sides of a deep ravine that drops about twenty feet to the ocean. The trees are second- or third-growth cedars and firs and Garry oak along with younger maples, all of them shrouded in English ivy, an invasive plant some idiot settler brought from the Old Country a cen­tury ago and let loose in the wild. Carpeting most of the forest floor, it's impossible to eradicate, but before he fell ill, Patrick headed out with secateurs twice a week to cut through the vines and free the trees from choking. I started to go with him. It was three years of hard, dirty work; when we hacked through a stem then yanked at the ivy that towered above, all kinds of debris— insects, dust, chunks of bark, twigs, needles, and sticky sap — fell on our heads. Some of the vines were as thick as a linebacker's thigh and Patrick had to use a bow saw to slice through their grip. I found it difficult to keep my footing. Logs I thought would hold me turned out to be punky and collapsed with my weight. Countless times I slammed onto my bum into a well of deep, wet foliage and had to grab a root to pull myself upright. We both laughed at my clumsiness. This was one way to learn the secrets of trees.

There's probably no better way to get to know a forest. We touched each one of the 400 or so trees, and they touched us back.

Patrick, who unlike me is used to forests, is more graceful, but once, out there alone and balancing on the edge of the ravine to get to the other side of a large fir, his foot broke through the downed trunk that had been supporting him and he tumbled vertically through 15 feet of blackberry canes, salal and fallen, multi-pronged branches to finally bang his body into the stones at the bottom where the creek ran into the bay. I heard him come through the door and rose from my office chair to find a wounded, bleeding man. His face and arms were scraped and scored, and he'd cracked his ribs on his right side, which hit the ground first. Yet after just a week away from it, we went back for two more years of cutting ivy until every tree in the grove was freed from its green strangulation.

There's probably no better way to get to know a forest. We touched each one of the 400 or so trees, and they touched us back. No words were needed, but we felt each other, across spe­cies boundaries, across the years, across their knowing and ours, bark and flesh, sap and blood, speaking and not speaking. We shared the same wind and rain during our hours among them. We suffered through drought. Perhaps it was fancy, but I felt sure the cedars and firs, some of them hundreds of years old, freed from decades of choking, breathed a sigh of relief and stretched their limbs higher into the sky. We had helped them do that. Had we ever done anything better?

Not knowing what to pray to during Patrick's first hospital stay, when I feared he wasn't getting better, every night I prayed to them — to the cedars, the firs, the oaks, the scrub maples.

Through our bedroom's sliding glass doors, from my pillow I can look across the front yard and the road to the tall outer fringe of green that borders the park. Each of the trees has felt our hands, heard our voices and breathed in our smell as we've torn at the ivy. Not knowing what to pray to during Patrick's first hospital stay, when I feared he wasn't getting better, every night I prayed to them — to the cedars, the firs, the oaks, the scrub maples. He was so good to you, I said out loud. Please use all of your ancient energy, your primal power to bring this man who worked so hard to save you safely home. May he, like you, reach tall and strong, his beautiful, day-dreamy head touching the sky. May he grow older than old beside you.

Excerpted from Through the Garden by Lorna Crozier. Copyright © 2020 Lorna Crozier. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.