Embedded Files
Essays train us to understand and use structure, to portray big ideas through a small lens, and to finish something. To read good essays is to savor the craft of writing, to take many trips into vastly different territories and writing styles within a short time, and to learn about plants from many different perspectives.
I will add to this collection of favorites as I continue to read; I'd love to hear from you about more plant-focused essays to expand this selection. The essays on this page tend towards the literary form, for more science-focused essays, please click here.
Hannah Austin: Jewel Thief
published in Hippocampus Magazine
A flash essay on house plants, looking at Wales across the water, and recovering from addiction.
Emily Brisse: Held
published in Sweet
Flash about holding and being held, featuring an oak stump.
K-Ming Chang: Consequences of Water
published in Asian American Writers' Workshop
How to eat kumquats for their skins, peel anything with a cleaver, understand bones grow into bodies like a tree, and believe coconuts fly from trees like ducks, bearing milk in their bellies.
Lucinda Cummings: Citrus Trees
published in Hippocampus Magazine
A mother's road trip with three citrus trees to fulfill the only one of her son's dreams she has the power to bring to fruition.
Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
An essay collection in book form.
Emily Jaeger: Sensitive Plants
published in Booth
A short, segmented essay about touching and being touched. If you've never thought of "columbus" as a verb, this one is for you.
Fiona M. Jones: Moss
published in Longleaf Review
A CNF flash, as small, green and lush as its title.
Brenda Miller: The Burden of Bearing Fruit
from: Listening against the Stone: New and Selected Essays
A Rainier cherry in the authors' yard beams out "Welcome Home" for many years, holding the house in an embrace that provided solace in the midst of much loneliness. The decision to fell the tree precipitates a string of tree-related memories on the difficulties of relationship, a melancholy journey that ends in unexpected redemption.
Students tend to point out that Miller sounds "whiny"; many can't relate and would rather be reading something upbeat. Teachers tend to point out that her mastery of essay structure alone merits time spent with her writing. My gratitude goes out to her for connecting trees, described with eloquent vivacity, to an intensely emotional presence within her own life.
Sarah Marie Neilson: The Queer Diary of an Extreme Heterozygote
published in Catapult
Arsenic-sugar botanical facts about scarred heartwood; a story about how "apples are somewhere between vanilla and bananas" that grows and grows, one knock-out sentence at a time.
Christen Noel: Oxalis in Parts
published in Gordon Square Review
A lyric essay on Ohio's intersections between urban and rural, wild and wasted, told in plant imagery that lives on telling true names.
Robert James Russell: Quaking Aspen
published in Pidgeonholes
On one of the oldest organism on Earth and the choice not to have children.
Ellen Samuels: "Sick and Well Time"
published in Brevity
Disability, visible and invisible, collapsing tomato cages, blight, and "Early Girl" fruit.
Amy Stuber: "A Tree that May in Summer Wear"
published in Cincinnati Review miCRos
Chain saws, ash borer, and the thousand changing faces of mother-daughter relationships.
Dot Armstrong: The Compost Manifesto
published in Sinking City
Gorgeous language on decomposition and its role in our future.
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