Writers have dug up more images and sentiments from gardens than they have flowers. Authors have enjoyed planting the odd tree (Walter Scott), housetraining hills with terraces (William Wordsworth and Edith Wharton), sitting out in a garden shed (Roald Dahl and Virginia Woolf) or fabricating an imaginary life for animals gambolling by (Beatrix Potter). Niall Williams' ties with his soil and his land are at once deeper and longer-term.

For more than three decades now, Williams has lived in a two-century-old stone cottage in the townland of Kiltumper, county Clare, in the West of Ireland. There he has written nine novels (one, The History of Rain, long-listed for the Booker), three plays, accounts of his own return to rural Ireland, a screenplay (of his Four Letters of Love) and, most recently, a chronicle of a year in his garden. Although Williams' last novel, This Is Happiness, received positive reviews, its reception does no justice to its quiet emotional force, wondrously beautiful language and unvarnished lyricism.

Williams' organic, intimate connection to the land is critical to his success. He regards gardening as vocation and education, not merely recreation. Gardening is a way of entrenching and embedding the author into his piece of land. Gardening imbues his sense of place with a sensual, visceral dimension.

Regardless of the weather, Williams spends half of every day outside. When we talked, steady rain had greeted him on his morning walk with a new puppy; more was forecast for later. In Williams' judgment, working in the garden entails a sense of history, recalling when each field possessed a separate name, school was conducted under a hedgerow, and the village itself was named for a mythical chieftain or giant.

Moreover, gardening exposes "how many things you do wrong". A plant might be in the wrong spot, crowding others out, not attracting enough sun or shade. Gardening therefore demands a constant awareness of your own "mis-steps and misunderstandings". Such self-criticism might then be applied to other segments of your life, ones which might also benefit from a dose of "re-editing, revising and redefining". A flower bed could possibly prompt course correction or confessional.

Like Seamus Heaney's poems, Williams' celebration of rural Ireland is not sentimental, never cloying, free from any stage-Irish affectations. Those fellows have no time for Yeats' "bee-loud glade" or "evening full of the linnet's wing". Their Ireland comprises "the squelch and slap of soggy peat", the next potato crop, and lots of rain. English Romantics who wrote about the gentle pleasure of the rested eye remained unaware of the cruel, hard work involved in living off the land. Ireland has not been a land of happy endings.

All that self-criticism out in the garden assisted Williams in writing "a story between two raindrops". In his "forgotten elsewhere", cows stand with "rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light". "Your house was rain with a fireplace."

Australians will never enjoy Ireland's rain nor suffer its history, but we are gradually acquiring a more profound sense of belonging. Look at Gwen Harwood's delicate poems about Tasmania, Tim Winton's love affair with the Western Australian coast, or Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain. They too can, as Heaney puts it, "catch the heart off guard and blow it open".

If gardening teaches a sense of the continuity and context of things, then so too does music. Take the Opry in Nashville, which insists on a country and Western version of apostolic succession. Established artists play a set, then introduce a newcomer who plays in turn, after which both musicians play together.

Williams revels in that musical, cultural, generational mash-up in his part of the world. He assured me that, at music festivals in the West of Ireland, recording artists mingle with total beginners. Renowned performers play duets with a boy blowing a tin whistle. You cannot tell musicians from farmers. All the performers display "a kind of abashed sense", with naturalness and humility mingled into that. Abashed, natural and humble are sweet adjectives to apply to artists at the top of their craft, whether they be in Tamworth or Tralee. If only we insisted politicians display those attributes as well.