Why I Garden

by Ross Gay

An exuberant, funny, and soulful meditation on the immense pleasures and the inevitable heartaches of gardening by the bestselling essayist and award-winning poet. In Why I Garden, the author of The Book of Delights brings his keen observation and joyful spirit to his own backyard garden.  But you don’t have to be a gardener to lose yourself in Ross Gay’s lyrical voice, his humor, and his original way of looking at the world.  There’s the “unabashed lustiness” of morning glories, and hummingbirds “swinging on the clothesline like an old married couple;” the thud of pawpaws dropping, and the seductive centerfolds of seed catalogs. We encounter the kind of surprising and urgent connections we’ve come to expect from the 1983 Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers serve as a benchmark for a thriving, diverse garden; an old toilet bowl planted with flowers leads to a consideration of the war machine; and he wonders “why prayer looks so much like digging potatoes.”Why I Garden is about gardening, but it’s also about how we care for each other and this planet and beckons us to cherish the earthly delights that are all around us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 20, 2027

About the author

Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.

His honors include being a Cave Canem Workshop fellow and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Tuition Scholar, and he received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.

He is an associate professor of poetry at Indiana University and teaches in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry. He also serves on the board of the Bloomington Community Orchard.