There is a sentimental season, early on in the process of mourning, in which you believe that everything you happen to be doing or seeing or eating, the departed person would also have loved to do or see or eat, were he or she still here on earth. Harvey would have loved this fried ball of rice. He would have loved the Pantheon. He would have loved that Rossetti of a girl with her thick black brows.

In “Love in the Gardens,” her latest essay published in The New York Review of Books, Rumpus interviewee Zadie Smith remembers her father, their Grand Tour across Europe and the love they shared for gardens.