Mat Riches: How I Wrote ‘Tomato Plants’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

I’d love to say that was a deliberate choice, that it was a way of showing the protagonist is boxed in like the tomatoes, or like the holes you cut into a tomato growbag, but I’d be lying.

Tomato Plants

Whenever colleagues shared pictures
of their new-borns at work, showing
photos of your yellow flowers
was maybe a bit much, perhaps,
but allow me these small moments
—this has been our first year together.

I’ve tended to you all summer,
putting far more care into that
than any plans for the future.
It’s anything but wasted time
when I’m combing through your branches.
Like a monkey grooming a child,
I remove the sun-swollen ticks
of your fruits every evening.

I’ve been recording my diary straight
onto your thin, reddening skins
before stirring my thinner words
into an autumnal curry,
or palming full Tupperware bowls
onto friends who only accept
as an act of misplaced courtesy.

I can see the looks in their eyes,
and suggest folks in glasshouses
are better off growing tomatoes.
There were two weeks away, fretting
about moisture and snails. I should’ve known
you’d cope without me.

I enjoy the humour of this poem with kids being replaced by tomato plants. I wonder if this poem is working on a number of levels – perhaps on one level breaking down ideas of what we should care about?

Thank you, I’m glad that some of the humour comes across. It’s something I try and put in all my work. Well, a lot of it. As someone who finds it almost impossible not to make a joke about everything, I am learning that some poems don’t need or warrant a gag or a joke of any kind. That said, I do think a “funny” line in a serious poem can be effective.

It’s kind of funny that you talk about tomato plants as a metaphor, or replacement for raising kids, as the message to say you were interested in this poem arrived on the week of my daughter’s 16th birthday, and despite the reference to showing photos of my “Tommies” to work colleagues when they’re showing off photos of their newborns (and a colleague did welcome the arrival of his first child this week), I hadn’t really thought of it from the angle you mention, but I quite like that interpretation of it. That said, I’ve never actually gone as far as showing off photos of my produce or really ever given them away either, but the poem feels true to me.

The other funny thing about the timing of this is that your invite arrived on the weekend when Prince Charles became King Charles as in some ways, he was an inadvertent catalyst for this poem. I half-recall reading about him talking to his plants, and how the idea of talking to plants is good for them. Something to do with CO2, I think, and an early draft of this poem was called ‘Photosynthesis’ as I figured there was something in that exchange of gases, of the plants taking the hot air I, or the version of me in the poem, was pumping out while I talked to them each night and them then turning it into something useful.

It felt to me like there was a bit of a mental well-being angle to the poem, with the plants assisting “me”, letting me off-load by acting as a kind of displacement activity. And in reality, they did during the lockdowns; it was amazing to be able to go outside and have that to do each night, to look after something and nurture them… to make sure I went outside, even if it was only to the end of my garden and back.

Looking back at my notes for this poem, I can see that it precedes lockdown and Covid (and it’s far from a COVID poem) by 2 years, with the first draft coming on 25th September 2018— I am writing this on 25th September 2022. However, I didn’t go back to it until 26th March 2020, so around the time lockdown was kicking in. It’s interesting – to me – to see how it has changed through the fourteen drafts that followed.

A further irony to the timing of your invite is that this year my tomatoes have been a disaster. They didn’t “cope without me” at all as the system I had in place to look after them while we went away for a week failed completely.

But I think you’re right when you mention the idea of “things to care about” For me, when writing it I had the idea of self-care in mind, but with the benefit of hindsight there is an unintentional look at what ranks as important. It’s amazing the stuff you think through and then the stuff you don’t.

You have some really interesting enjambment in this poem which work to create tension in the line, or to surprise: “the sun-swollen ticks / of your fruit”. Is that something you have cultivated? Are there particular poets whose enjambment you admire?

I think with enjambment that I am learning as I go. There’s desire to hit each end of a line and make it meaningful, to make that have an impact, but to also allow the start of the next line kick off strongly as well—at least some of the time. Maybe like a swimmer doing lengths – they end strongly and push off strongly. However, this particular poem is one that is self-contained stanzas. I’d love to say that was a deliberate choice, that it was a way of showing the protagonist is boxed in like the tomatoes, or like the holes you cut into a tomato growbag, but I’d be lying.

I am learning to get better at moving away from what a dear friend and the person that sees all my first (and subsequent) drafts calls “semantic blocks”. This is helping the music of the poems to come out a bit more.

Because I also tend to work in syllabics, there is also that framework to work within… that will often cause the enjambment to take on a life of its own, but it must be said that I don’t let it take over. You can’t just break the line because you’ve hit the syllable count – despite that being the path of least resistance.

This is a cop out, but I admire anyone that can do that with a line, and that makes for a lot of poets and a lot of admiration. To be able to hang some wow moments on the frame of that technical skill is almost a guaranteed sock-knocker-offer regardless of the subject.

The last line is satisfying. It almost seems to say that we don’t have to be parents to experience certain kinds of feelings or to pass through certain epiphanies?

It sort of feels like we may have covered this to a degree, but my intention with this line was to push the focus back to the protagonist, to suggest that despite them being the person that does the watering, the feeding, etc, that the relationship is very far from being one-sided. He/they/me got/gets more back from the act of nurturing than the nurtured, and that absence made the heart (if not the tomatoes) grow stronger.

However, as we’ve also touched upon already, it’s amazing to me what a reader will take from a poem, and I can 100% see that it’s very much the case that we don’t need to be a parent to experience these moments. Our epiphanies come from all angles and places… now, hang on… there’s a poem in that.