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There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names The ability to inventory the flora of an imagined terrain, especially with local variants, is often taken as a sign of novelistic prowess: where, in postmodernism’s wake, pretence to interior knowledge falters, knowledge of surface takes over When Cormac McCarthy guides his readers around the southern states of America, he can sometimes seem more a botanist than a novelist, so lacking are his novels in interiority and abundant in the common names of flowers When Michael Pietsch arranged the fragments of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King for publication, he naturally placed at the beginning an unlocated paragraph describing a landscape that features an extensive, incantatory list of obscure plant names: ‘shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimsonweed,’ and on it goes Philip Roth once playfully suggested he should give up writing because, as he put it, ‘I don’t even know the names of the trees’ Names are knowledge, the logic might suggest, and knowledge is mastery Though we might mourn the loss of these languages from our lives, and though this kind of writing might prompt us to redress that loss, to the average reader, in the immediate term, a parade of plant names like Wallace’s can be like nonsense verse: the words are interesting for their shape, their weight, their buoyancy, but they call no image into being It can thus look like a kind of peacocking: a florid display of the writer’s close attention to the world that disempowers the reader’s imagination Looked at another way, however, the effect becomes a metonym for the condition of fiction: with the writer as our guide, we look both at and away from the world   Christine Schutt understands more than most fiction’s necessary imbrication of things, names and ways of seeing – that, in other words, there is no objective gaze Of the eleven stories in her fertile, dense and blooming new collection, Pure Hollywood (her first to be published in the UK), five feature gardeners prominently There are as