Articles
Rooted in literature: HCC English Professor Cathy Clay cultivates minds through nature
Oct 7, 2025
In a quiet corner of Houston City College’s Northwest Campus is where literary theory and soil meet. That is where English Professor Cathy Clay tends to more than just blooming plants—she’s cultivating young minds.
Through an innovative fusion of literature and gardening, she brings English texts to life by drawing connections between the resilience of plants and the complexity of human characters. Her method is anything but conventional, and that’s exactly the point.
“I learned so many lessons through gardening,” Professor Clay says, kneeling beside a purple salvia in what she affectionately calls the “Inspired Garden” at the college’s campus. “I thought, maybe I can incorporate this into my classes.”
The native Houstonian and former Sunnyside resident holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.A. in English from Texas Southern University.
She’s also a published poet and novelist. Her novel, Agatta, tells the haunting yet redemptive story of a young prostitute seeking spiritual liberation in late 19th-century New Orleans. The book, soon to be published in an audio version, has been praised for its lyrical prose and deep insights.
In the classroom where her love of language and passion for imparting ideas to students is bolstered, she believes, by blending traditional literary analysis with hands-on horticulture.
“My Composition 1302 class is primarily a literary argument class,” she explained. “Many literary texts feature nature—either overtly or subtly. I want my students to be able to make clear arguments about literary devices and context. So, I thought, why not use gardening as a bridge?”
It began as a casual idea shared at a literary conference a couple of years ago and has blossomed into a thriving experiment. With the support of HCC’s Innovations Fellowship program and encouragement from her faculty chair, Dr. Mary Lawson, Professor Clay launched the initiative that encourages students to spend time outside, planting native Texas flora like salvia, cone flowers and milkweed.
“Gardening makes the abstract more tangible,” Professor Clay said. “When students see two plants of the same species and observe one thriving and one failing—it becomes easier to talk about characters like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, where flowers symbolize death, or the brothers in The Red Convertible, whose different paths shape their fates.”
Her students agree. “The way she teaches is more engaging and entertaining,” said Evan Glenn, who is studying computer science. “You can’t just look at a plant and think it’s fine. You’ve got to check its water, its sunlight. It’s the same thing with literature: you have to look deeper and understand what’s really going on beneath the surface.”
The garden is adjacent to the campus’s maker space. Many of its plants are native perennials which requires minimal maintenance, resilient and beneficial to the environment. “We plant pollinators because we want our ideas to spread. We choose native plants because they thrive in their environment, just like we hope our students do,” Professor Clay said.
She shares this perspective with her students, encouraging them to view literature as nature rooted in the world around them. “Humans are stewards of the planet,” she explained. “Our behaviors create ripple effects in nature—just like the choices characters make in stories. For every action, there’s a reaction. That’s literature. That’s life.”
Her hope is that the gardening and nature concept within teaching will continue at HCC. “It would be wonderful if every HCC campus had a garden like this,” she said.