Go to the Source

By Ashley Harris

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Last week I braced the cold to gather several branches of “breath o’ spring,” a perennial bush that offers the year’s first aromatic flowers. As the name implies, this plant is a hint of the season to come, and its tiny, tasseled blooms offer a tantalizing whiff of pine and lemon.

Nature is just one of my passions, and it often appears in my writing. What are your obsessions? Mining them can be an enjoyable and effective way to generate all sorts of creative pieces, especially nonfiction essays. But how do you weave your obsessions into a longer work that appeals to a wide audience? Try tapping into the power of research. Using information from external sources can bring authority and polish to your writing.

When I was writing “The Year of the North Star,” an essay based on my seven years of growing cherries (upcoming in the April 2025 online issue of GreenPrints), I consulted a number of resources, from literature to magazine articles by gardening experts.

A surprising source was The Oxford English Dictionary, which yielded a fascinating tidbit on the history of the word “cherry” that I simply had to incorporate: “Known as a ‘false singular,’ the word ‘cherry’ entered our language on the mistaken assumption that its Northern French root cherise was plural. People in Chaucer’s day extracted the word ‘cheri’ to denote a single fruit, and by Shakespeare’s time, the spelling changed for good. ‘So we grew together, like to a double cherry…two lovely berries molded on one stem,’ Helena says to her childhood friend Hermia in A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

My research into the history of the cherry not only added texture to my essay, but it also helped me structure it by connecting all the various segments. Research is as inspirational as it is useful and can even be an effective remedy against writer’s block. There’s nothing like new knowledge on a favorite topic to help stir your imagination and breathe fresh air into an essay.