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

Author and gardener Kincaid believes that ""[m]emory is a gardener's real palette... as it summons up the past... shapes the present... [and] dictates the future."" For many, specific plants evoke specific memories; gathering 35 brief essays and poems that have been written throughout this century, Kincaid has compiled a bouquet of these plants and their corresponding memories. In ""Lily,"" Colette remembers placing the eponymous white flowers around a statue of Mary, who ""would be brushing, with the tips of her dangling fingers, the long, half-open cayman jaws of a lily at her feet."" Czech writer Karol Capek writes in ""Buds,"" published in 1929, that for him, even if he went out into the country, he would ""see less of the spring than if I sat in my little garden"" in Prague. Poet Maxine Kumin shares her appreciation of non-flowering plants and confesses that ""nothing looks prettier to me than a well-tended flourishing vegetable garden."" Ian Frazier, in ""Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener,"" divulges how, after years of weeding gardens in his suburban childhood, he came to appreciate the activity, and when visiting ""gardening friends... ask[s] what weeding needs to be done."" In one of the strongest entries, ""Marigold,"" Hilton Als admits hating that flower. During one childhood summer when his mother was ill, he recalls, he ate dirt from the marigold bed, to which his father devoted all his attention, and developed ringworm. Kincaid hopes that readers will draw some satisfaction from this collection, because a ""garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy."" In this she has succeeded, by presenting a book that is often beautiful, though some of its parts are not as radiant as others, and a few have yet to blossom. (Oct.)