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But the performances — lit theatrically, in old, empty spaces in London and Brighton — feature backup singers, a string quartet and an appearance by Marianne Faithfull, reciting the May Sarton poem “Prayer Before Work.”

Nature, and the garden, likewise informed the life of May Sarton.

Not long after, my therapist handed me a copy of Sarton’s memoir, “Journal of a Solitude,” as a homework assignment.

A few years earlier, in “Plant Dreaming Deep” — among the most successful of her 50-something works of poetry, fiction and memoir — Sarton offered a prescriptive one-liner for the bad days, learned from her mother: “What better way to get over a black mood than an hour of furious weeding.”

“You would like May Sarton,” Sydney Schanberg, a former Times colleague best known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting on the fall of Cambodia in 1975, told me offhandedly 30-something years ago.