Like many anthologies, My Favorite Plant suffers from some unevenness, both in the quality and tone of the content. This unevenness is exacerbated by the fact that Jamaica Kincaid, the editor, chose to include both standard garden writing with more literary pieces. Standard garden writing - either about a specific flower, species, piece of design advice, etc. - can be excellent, but is written with the purpose of educating a specific audience. The "literary" pieces in My Favorite Plant (i.e., poems by DH Lawrence or William Carlos Williams, or vignettes from Collette) tend to use the flower as metaphor to get at something else.

Because of everything is a bit of a mixed bag, this book works best if only one or two pieces are read at a time. This is not a book to read all in a piece on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

And what in the heck is the story "Marigolds" by Hilton Als doing here? It's gross and completely out of place, not matching the tone, style or content of anything else in the anthology. I'm sure it was chosen to shock the reader, but in my mind it was more shocking because of its obvious poor fit with the rest of the pieces in the book than because of its subject matter. ( )