NIGHT GARDENING

Children’s writer Kathryn Lasky becomes E.L. Swann to author this adult melodrama about declining families, thankless children, and, above all, blossoming love in the golden years. Maggie Welles is 61 when, working in the multileveled but badly neglected garden of her large house just off Harvard Square, she suffers a stroke. Widowed, spunky, and well-off, Maggie at 61 still has much of the beauty she possessed as a girl in Boston, where she grew up in a lace-curtain Irish family; and it’s this beauty—in her green eyes, for example, and once-red and still-abundant hair—that first attracts the eye and soon thereafter the heart of one Tristan Mallory, hyper-successful landscape artist to the very, very rich, himself 60, long divorced, and at the moment (since it’s spring) creating an elaborate new landscaped garden at the house next door. In a hint of Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan peeks at Maggie through the crack in a garden wall as, in the woebegone garden on her side, she works with her speech therapist and does walking exercises at parallel bars. The mysterious attraction that the handsome Tristan feels for Maggie is intensified quickly when it’s discovered that both he and she are expert lovers of floral beauty and rarity (——Oh my goodness, Polymnia canadensis,” Maggie whispered—), and, under Mallory’s “care” as a gardener-lover (—He wanted only to submit himself completely to her rareness—), Maggie begins making great strides in recovering from the losses of her stroke; but, even as she and Tristan fix up her garden by night (and make love in it), the legacy of Maggie’s insensitive and alcoholic husband (who married her with no sense of her true rarity) intrudes in the form of her insensitive and alcoholic son, whose eager desire for his inheritance will prove itself the canker in the rose garden indeed. Many a stylistic stumble, a paper-thin male lead, and much horticulture aimed straight at the sentimental.