Of Leaf and Flower: Stories and Poems for Gardeners

The answers to many gardening questions can be found in practical books and essays, but how to explain the passions behind the obsession? Why do we get down on our hands and knees in the mud in March? What lures us back to the garden for one last look before dark? Only storytellers and poets can tell us.

In this anthology of twelve stories and twelve poems, major American and British authors celebrate the powerful emotions that plants and gardening inspire. H. E. Bates writes about a man so struck by the beauty of a lily that he goes to extremes to possess it. Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett spin tales of exotic gardens with the power to heal and to arouse love, one in California, the other in Maine. Poet James Schuyler tenderly frets over an ailing fern. In a witty story by Saki, a British society woman orders a garden in full bloom, installed for the afternoon, to outdo a luncheon guest whose own garden is the envy of the neighborhood. And in poems of profound simplicity, Robert Frost asks "which is fairer, flower or leaf?" while Billy Collins shows a bonsai's power to change our perspective on the whole world.

These selections create a collection as rich and sensuous as a garden itself. Like individual plants in a garden, each one will draw you back again and again for a closer look, another reading, new insights, and new rewards. With twelve accompanying sumi ink paintings of flowers and plants by Clyde Wachsberger, Of Leaf and Flower cultivates a gardener's passions through word and image, season after season.