A story of love, marriage, and flowers from beloved writer and gardening enthusiast Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
Six months before her wedding, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn's fiancé broke off their engagement. Stunned, reeling, and newly uninsured, Alysia married her friend Sarah in an arrangement that secured them both free health insurance. They moved in together in the midst of the pandemic, and with time and while tending a garden, their marriage of convenience grew into a marriage of love.
In science, art, and mythology, we cannot help but to see flowers as metaphors for the fleeting nature of youth, vitality, and love. It's easy to casually admire something beautiful, but it takes a discerning eye to appreciate the effort that went into nourishing and tending to that beauty. In both gardening and relationships, one cannot expect to fill your garden with flowers if you are unwilling--or unable--to put in the work they need to thrive. In I Have This Thing For Flowers, Sawchyn does just that, likening the many flowers she has grown in her gardens to a range of relationships and moments of her life, reflecting on topics from motherhood to perfumery to scientific illustration.
Cataloguing many of the great romances and loves of her life like an herbarium of flowers preserved from the garden, Sawchyn examines the kinds of love that can't be explained.
About the Author :
Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a writer, editor, and educator living in Western North Carolina. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of The Rumpus magazine, she has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review and the Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Their first essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs, was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards.
Review :
"Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn writes with clarity and courage about marriage, illness, and care, reminding us that devotion isn't a feeling so much as a choice we make again and again. These finely crafted essays demonstrate that to love flowers (and each other)--to keep showing up for them--is to insist on gentleness in a world that so often rushes past it." -Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders
"I Have This Thing For Flowers excels in how it uses the essay to build worlds, one that feel distinctly tied to the speaker, but also invite you, the reader, inside of them. I was so delighted by the warmth in this book, the vibrant imagery, the way these self-built worlds are honored, as well as the people in them. This is a generous book. "--Hanif Abdurraqib, NYT bestselling author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and There's Always This Year
"Simone Weil famously wrote that 'Attention is prayer, ' and Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn shows this in action. Whether attending to garden or archive or memory, her incantatory prose becomes a lesson in both how to see and how to love--not just the heady blooms, but the tangles of root and thorn we encounter along the way. This voice is tender, fierce, and utterly unique."--Erica Berry, award-winning author of Wolfish
"Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn braids an astonishing lyric using the grammar of scent, the syntax of color, to pierce through the history of art, myth, taxonomy, and plunder that is knotted inside every petal and root around us. What I thought was familiar was made strange again. Enthralled by the end, I set the book down and walked barefoot into a garden."--Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, award-winning author of Here to Stay
"Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn shows us what it means to live in all this beauty. Impermanence is the secret gift for the living, Sawchyn tells us, if only we'll take a moment to look. I Have This Thing For Flowers is a meditation on our humanity--our aches and ills, thefts and addictions, ceremonies and poems, holes and doors. But make no mistake, this book is about survival. We are a rose growing out of concrete. In 2026, these essays are exactly what we need: a balm." --D/ANNIE LIONTAS, award-winning author of Sex With A Brain Injury
"Nimble and surprising, the essays in this collection draw myriad connections between the flora of everyday living and one fascinating human life. I came to this book excited for its promised blend of research and storytelling, and while I read, I savored the delightful narrative voice--smart, wry, never stilted--that led me through these twenty-two personal (and botanical) stories. Brava to Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn for cultivating such a singular and compelling work of nonfiction."--Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
"I Have This Thing for Flowers is fiery, urgent, and intimate, both electrically familiar and enthralling in its unpredictability. Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn invites readers into confidence--into worried rooms, sun-soaked gardens, onto torn up lawns--in prose that is suspenseful, sardonic, and stylish, though never at the expense of Sawchyn's genuineness. I Have This Thing for Flowers is a frank and tender collection; it suspends and transforms, a smoke ring in the dark you won't soon forget."--T Kira Madden, author of Whidbey
