What Matters Most | Ep. 3 Margaret Renkl
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For the third episode of What Matters Most, author Margaret Renkl joins us from her backyard and gives us a personal tour of her “pollinator garden,” where she has intentionally planted seeds that serve as refuge and fuel for the bees and butterflies who traverse her home in middle-Tennessee.
“It’s really a great comfort—if we had to be locked in our houses anyway— that it happened in the springtime when there is so much new life and that is always a reminder I think, that things will go on.”
In Margaret’s garden we find luscious patches of butterfly weed, bee balm, daisies, Joe Pye weed, and catmint—“I’m gonna give you a sense of just how fun it is to plant not necessarily for what’s the prettiest flower but what’s the one the bees like best,” she beckons. Margaret is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, published by Milkweed Editions last summer.
Just like the strain of milkweed in Margaret’s garden is the site of metamorphosis for monarch butterflies, Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. We hope you’ll join us by giving a sustaining gift today.
Margaret Renkl
Margaret Renkl is the author of Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South and Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Proximity, and River Teeth, among others. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.
From Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.
