Something interesting happens when plants and humans meet. Whether secret, paradisal, or haunted, the garden is one of our very first metaphors. From the myth of Narcissus to Klimt’s kaleidoscopic poppies, narratives of flowers confront us with our desire for beauty, control, transformation, and violence. In Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s second collection of essays, I Have This Thing for Flowers, she digs in this rich soil to unearth the roots of her own romantic and platonic relationships.
Sawchyn’s original garden was her mother’s, in which she spent hours sitting in “passive admiration” of the trees and blossoms. Though her mother tended the garden with great care, she modestly insisted it had always been there. Throughout her braided essays, Sawchyn explores this tension between happenstance and labor as she attempts to cultivate both relationships and flowers in her garden. She begins the book with an ending—the rupture of an engagement—and unfolds the story of her subsequent marriage to a female friend through twenty-two alphabetically arranged essays. Each essay title pairs a flower genus with an important figure in Sawchyn’s life, from a friend who dies after a prolonged illness to an on-again-off-again lover. Sawchyn deftly weaves together personal narrative, horticultural research, and botanical illustrations to offer us a new type of garden to revel in.
This summer I was delighted to talk to Sawchyn by phone about the trap of taxonomies, the fluidity of relationships, and writing about her experience of hurricane Helene.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: Tell me about the seeds of this project: how did I Have This Thing for Flowers begin?
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn: Possibly even before my first book came out, I was chatting with Derrick Austin (whose wonderful art-filled collection This Elegance just came out and I highly recommend) at a playground in Tampa. I told him that if I could write any book I would write a collection of braided essays about flowers. He said I should call it Anthology—which is how I learned that the etymology of “anthology” is a collection of flowers. I thought that would be so funny! And no one would buy it!
Many years later, when I had actually been gardening seriously, I thought, “Wait, maybe this could actually work.” I spent a long time researching, thinking, and planning before I wrote anything. It took me forever to get to the premise of the herbarium. There are so many flowers I love and selecting just a few seemed impossible. Again, I was saved by another person. I asked Elena Passarello how she selected the subjects in her collection Animals Strike Curious Poses, and she suggested that I just make rules for myself. I hated that answer and also it made a ton of sense: I decided that the collection was going to be arranged alphabetically and each essay titled after a genus of flower that I’ve grown in my garden or had a lot of contact with. Once I had that framework in place, it was a lot easier to begin writing.
When I pitched the book to my agent, I made one of those Venn diagrams and described it as “a book about flowers and a failed marriage” à la H is for Hawk meets In the Dream House narrated by the woman from My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Though that’s how I first envisioned the book, that’s not entirely where it’s ended up.
Rumpus: What surprises came out of adhering to that framework and when did you choose to break away from your own constraints?
Sawchyn: One of the rules I definitely broke early on was not making myself use every letter and allowing myself to repeat letters. Don’t make me pick between peonies and poppies! What I found surprising was that picking a single species was too limiting and, conversely, some of the genuses are huge. Ranunculus, for example, contains those muli-petaled luxury wedding flowers but also buttercups. I wasn’t expecting to have to cover so much in some of the essays.
Rumpus: You did an enormous amount of research for these essays, not just about flowers, but also perfume production, mythology, and architecture. Which of these narratives were the most challenging to gather and synthesize?
Sawchyn: I had the hardest time with the Magnolia chapter, which has a lot of science in it. In researching that essay, I spent so much time with people whose job is literally plants—experts in taxonomy and forestry—and learned an overwhelming amount about plant reproduction. It was challenging because I’ve entered this uncanny valley stage: I objectively know a lot more than a layperson but also feel like I don’t know anything, especially compared to these scientists. I wanted to be accurate, but also not boring—I didn’t want to sound like I swallowed a textbook. In the end, I ended up focusing on a couple specific breeding programs and cutting a lot of the other research.
Rumpus: You mentioned being confronted throughout this project by how much you don’t know. At the beginning of the collection, you contrast your naïve, passive enjoyment of your mother’s garden without knowing anything about horticulture to the deep appreciation you gained through learning about flowers’ cultural context, historical classification, and the cost of labor. How has spending so much time attending to the latter for this project changed your relationship to flowers?
Sawchyn: I’m definitely not over them! I’m growing two different kinds of Shirley poppies (Papaver rhoeas) right now, which makes me really happy. I think I am now more struck by the absurdity or beauty and value of human labor. Which side I land on changes frequently. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term “volunteer plant” where a desirable plant (like a tomato or a lettuce) is growing in a garden of its own accord. But before I ever gardened or did any research about flowers, I knew the word “wildflower,” and I’d always thought, “Oh, how hard could it be?” To quote the Yiyun Li title, “things in nature merely grow.”
Now I think about how much time and energy it takes to, for example, grow a tomato plant from seed. Many people buy plant starts once the weather is warm and skip the often finicky process of “starting” seeds way back in February—or whenever, you actually have to do some math to figure out the best time—and also, there are a half-dozen volunteer tomatoes where I’m gardening right now. It’s both wonderful and absurd. We spend all this time and labor trying to breed and perfect plants according to our own whims, but, many times, they just exist on their own.
Rumpus: Alongside our hyperfixation with breeding particular types of flowers, we also have an obsession with categorizing them. I love how you probe our gendering of nature in this collection. You write about Linneaus and how “[the] classification of the world has always been a fraught exercise, one often conducted by men.” Flowers may be considered feminine distractions, but only men are allowed to name them. How do these essays, by pairing people with flowers, serve as an alternative model of classification?
Sawchyn: Linneaus’ system for classifying plants was based on their flowers—the reproductive parts of the plant—which offers some real low hanging fruit for commentary about how men see the world. My hope is that the pairings in my essays, despite the book’s overall narrative, take seriously those non-romantic and non-familial relationships. Any taxon is inherently flawed, which doesn’t fit neatly with (often) our ideas about classification and science. Our brains want to find the “right” frame, the comfortable and certain pattern, but that’s not what the world offers. For example, in the Dicentra chapter, I mention how bleeding hearts were reclassified in the aughts due to genetic testing—now they’re their own genus!
Rumpus: I’m wondering how this ties into your depiction of relationships in this collection. We have a system of taxonomy: girlfriend, husband, et cetera, that is so often insufficient. With more data and time, these titles often get re-named and re-categorized.
Sawchyn: Absolutely—all relationships change over time! In my better moments, despite my aforementioned love of certainty, I’m grateful for the fact that I can change my mind (that I can be wrong…). We do often need more information and more time to understand a relationship, which is always fluid.
I’ve always had a capacious sense of people and often said or thought, “Why does this particular relationship have to look like that?” As I’ve gotten older, I understand some of this through my experience of queer relationships. For better and for worse, there are far fewer models of how to “be” a queer person, both as a self and in relationship to others. As a basic example for the latter, studies about the division of household labor often articulate in their findings how for queer couples this work is something explicitly negotiated versus assumed.
Rumpus: There is a lot of transformation in the book. I particularly loved the Ovid myths like Daphne and Apollo that you weave throughout these chapters. While in these stories people are being turned into plants, in your collection these stories are twisted so the transformation is bi-directional: people became flowers and flowers became people.
Sawchyn: You asked earlier what the hardest research was for the book and I’ll say that the mythology was by far the easiest. I was a nerdy kid and had a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman myths before I started writing. One of the things I like most about these narratives is how they’ve constantly been referenced and retold in other forms of art. For example, in the Narcissus chapter, I pulled in some Monica Youn poems and JJ Grandville etchings. It’s not simply “here’s this old story,” but tracing what has happened to the story over time. (And how those changes also reflect us!)
I think a lot about the often quoted (and sometimes misinterpreted) Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We have to construct something to make sense of our experience of the world inside our heads, and in writing non-fiction, things are even further elided, synthesized, and imperfect. I really like stories of transformation because they gesture towards that.
Rumpus: We obviously have to talk about the book’s title.
Sawchyn: Ha, yes. Whenever I’m working on a really big project, I trick myself into feeling less pressure by titling the document something jokey. For example, I’m working on a novel currently that has a real title in my mind but the document is called “whale of a time.” I’d jokingly named this one “I have this thing for flowers,” and when I gave it to my agent, she was like, “Actually, I love this.” And the press felt the same. Sometimes my impulses are correct!
Rumpus: Tell me a little about selecting the visuals for this book, including the drawings of the flowers at the start of each chapter.
Sawchyn: In my book proposal I’d included artwork of the flowers alongside the sample chapters. It was important to me to incorporate because I don’t always include physical descriptions of the flowers in their corresponding chapter. When someone asks me about a car, I say, “Oh yeah, it’s small and red,” and a lot of people see flowers that way! The process of selecting the images was fun. It reminded me of a linguistics class where the teacher asked us, “Which cup is the cuppiest cup?” As a student, that made me want to scream, but while looking at all these flower illustrations, I was like, “Which lily is the lilliest lily? For the genuses that are incredibly large, which of these images is the most representative?” I love the way the illustrations in the book ended up looking like a botanical guide.
Rumpus: At the emotional and physical center of the book is an essay about your friend Laurel —the only essay whose title is not a flower paired with a descriptor of a person (“The Digger,” “The Gambler,” et cetera.). Was the Laurel essay always a fulcrum of the collection?
Sawchyn: It was very subconscious that the form I created placed her at the exact center of the book. I did always know I was going to include her in the book, and I’d planned from the get-go for the essay’s title to just be her name. Structurally, this was a way for me to give weight to a non-romantic and deeply meaningful relationship. I want more books about friendship in the world! (Lily Dancyger’s First Love is a wonderful example of this!)
The personal narrative section of the Laurel essay is actually the oldest writing in the book—I wrote it over 10 years ago, and revised it for this book. My teacher Ira Sukrungruang used to say, “That’s the problem with writing non-fiction—if you take too long, you’ll change your mind!” It was interesting to revisit something written so long ago and to see not only how I felt about the craft of the work, but the emotions I described.
Rumpus: I imagine the “newest” parts of this book were the sections you wrote about Hurricane Helene. Having experienced the storm with you in Asheville, I know how disruptive it was for all aspects of our lives, including the writing of this collection. How did you decide how much of the hurricane would appear in these essays?
Sawchyn: True to form, my initial impulse was to avoid everything. That was in large part because my initial plan was to cap the narrative of Flowers at around the time in my life when I sold the book. It was all so neatly planned out! With the exception of the personal narrative in the Laurel chapter, almost everything from the second half of the book was written after the hurricane. Helene was such a horrible and long-lasting traumatic event for so many people, and I didn’t know how to bring that in without breaking the premise of the book or having it veer off into a totally different direction.
That said, many of my favorite non-fiction writers let you get a glimpse of their brain and how they make connections between seemingly disparate subjects, and in reworking my initial plans for some of these essays I began linking new things: Sally Wen Mao’s The Kingdom of Surfaces, Hilma Af Klint’s watercolors, and, eventually, the experience of seeing the flowers blooming after Helene.
Rumpus: So much has happened to you personally and professionally since you completed this collection! If you were to write an afterward, one final essay, what flower would you pick to represent the current phase of your life and relationships and why?
Sawchyn: I’m actually stuck between two: one is a rose, which I intentionally did not include in this book. I have grown many roses and have had complicated feelings about them, which tracks with some things about my current life—in which I am in a much more conventional relationship with a man. In my drafting and writing of Flowers, I had chosen to not include roses because so much has been said about them. Alex Chee’s essay “The Rosary” and Rebecca Solnit’s entire book on roses, Orwell’s Roses are great and recent examples. Just read those! I don’t want to compete with that.
My other choice is a Black-Eyed Susan vine. They’re not related to Black-Eyed Susans—it’s a different genus entirely. The vine flowers have these very dark, non-protruding centers that look like a black hole. I could stare at them forever. I’m trying to grow them this summer and having a terrible time of it, even though they grew just fine last year. It’s probably a question of sunlight, but they are new and surprising to me.
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