Excerpt From I Would Know You Anywhere appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The Kenyon Review.
I’m no gardener. Even living in the UK, where they’ve raised gardening to an art as formal as Mannerist painting, a garden is something I walk through to get to the house. I touch no plants if I can help it. Honestly, it’s an act of mercy. In a garden, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But as with so many art forms that I can’t practice myself, I see the beauty in what eludes me. When I first encountered Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson’s excerpt from her novel I Would Know You Anywhere, I was struck by the way that the central figure in that narrative is referred to only as “the gardener.” We meet her in a moment of urgency, rushing to slam doors to hold warmth in among the plants that she’s rescued from her garden before the winter has its way with them.
There’s something profoundly moving about seeing her whole identity consumed by this need to protect her plants. To be a gardener is to take on a role as ancient as culture itself. Consider the history of the dahlias that this gardener fights to save from the bitter cold:
No one the gardener knows has eaten them, ever. She doesn’t even know they were food once, a thousand years ago in Mexico, that dahlias made it this far by the grace of the people who grew them and ate them there for thousands of years. That civilization was burned, and the ashes were scattered. People like the gardener built new homes on the wreckage.
Plumlee-Watson’s story meditates on the brutality that lies an inch below the surface of the garden. Her gardener poisons the mouse that scurries through her basement, then thinks carefully about the ways in which the poison she’s set out drowns the mouse in its own blood, reducing it to a scrap of fur on the concrete floor. She thinks about the bog body Grauballe Man and his last meal of porridge filled with grain and wildflowers, consumed the night before “someone cut his throat from ear to ear, drained the blood from his body, and sank him in the dark brown waters of the bog.” It’s a bloody business, this gardening, a confrontation with the violence of seasons, the cyclicity of planting and harvest, growth and decay. Protecting her dahlias requires the gardener to plunge her knife into their hearts, gouging away the soft spots where bacteria or fungi feed on them. What the garden reveals is that life itself is brutal. “It’s never a choice between life and death,” the gardener reminds us, “just between the life of the dahlia and other, slimier kinds of life that would consume it.”
But that’s looking at it wrong, the gardener realizes. It’s like peering into the narrow tunnel of a microscope in her science class and seeing only darkness. When she gets the angle right to catch a glimpse of light in all that darkness, what she sees is a transcendent burst of color:
You will see lots of cells at once at this scale, said the professor, and lots of chloroplasts inside each cell, glowing green. She had not said that the chloroplasts would be moving. She didn’t mention their tumbling over one another in slow circuits within the confines of each cell, all at roughly the same speed. More green than the gardener has seen in months spirals from black edge to black edge of her vision. Flooded with the light of the microscope, the chloroplasts in the cells in the leaf are rotating toward brightness and away from brightness, photosynthesizing and trying not to get burned.
For the gardener, it’s a powerful moment of recognition: “Wet life surges toward wet life.” And within that recognition lies both a promise and an acknowledgement of debt. Even in the worst moments of winter, we can take solace in the promise of a green return. But seeing that also requires us to acknowledge our dependence on the plants that we nurture, prune, and harvest. The gardener, it turns out, is not the real power in this narrative: It’s those tumbling green chloroplasts hidden deep within the cells that make all life—from the dahlia to the gardener—emerge each year out of the darkness of winter.
