November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

My Grandmother's Peonies

(Page 4 of 4)

January-February 1999
by Michael Fox, from the book My Favorite Plant 
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"Oh, girls, isn't it wonderful . . ." There's no real locus for enthusiasm like this: It is wide-eyed, infectious; it seems to take in all of the world, and time—the look forward and the look back. Such gusto must be the best thing to cultivate in life, whenever possible: the absurdly lush flower, big as a plate and up from nothing, here and gone; towering foliage that deflates with frost and blackens on the ground in graphic death, then jumps up again from a winter's sleep—improbable, plucky, resplendent, and impermanent, spring after spring after spring.

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Adapted from the collection My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, edited by Jamaica Kincaid. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Fox. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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