My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners and the Plants They Love

Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author’s favorite flora.

The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.

Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems “Bearded Irises” and “Peonies.” Ian Frazier pulls weeds in “Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener,” and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in “Consider the Castor Bean”; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances.