A few years ago, author Meg Donohue became what she calls a “hobbyist gardener,” turning to her small urban garden in San Francisco for a little entertainment—if not something a bit more challenging.
“I’m from the East Coast,” Donohue says, “so the magic of living in a place where things bloom year-round has not faded for me.”
Donohue’s latest novel “The Memory Gardener” (Gallery Books, 352 pages, $19, Nov. 25, 2025) takes her interest in the magical outdoors a step further, inviting readers to examine the power of love while stopping to smell the roses. She launches it in events this month in San Francisco and Danville.
The best-selling author of 2019’s “You, Me, and the Sea” (recommended by Oprah.mag, Parade and Entertainment Weekly), “Every Wild Heart” and “Dog Crazy” has written an enchanting tale following Lucy Barnes, who returns to her hometown after her mother’s death to restore the ruined gardens at the Oceanview Home, a stately but deteriorating senior residence. Lucy also uses her secret talent: intuiting which flower’s scent will restore each person’s memories of love—though the effects are often not what she expected.
Donohue says the impetus for the book were her own garden’s scents which evoked certain moments for her: “Your mind wanders when you’re doing that sort of work and transports you to other moments,” she says. She began to imagine a book centered around scent and memory and flowers.
After reading work by the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, who examined how being in nature helped awaken his elderly patients, Donohue was further inspired: “He believed there is a true connection between nature and the brain and that being in nature can change the brain’s way of operating.”
During the pandemic, wanting to write a book about multigenerational friendships and how gardens affect people of every age, Donohue spent plenty of time in her garden, visited the San Francisco Botanical Garden and the Garden of Fragrances: “I was living in that feeling of the comfort that you get in those places and wanted to put that feeling into the book for myself and my readers,” she says.
While “You, Me, and the Sea” had small mystical moments, “Memory Gardener” is the first book where Donohue introduces a truly magical element in Lucy’s ability to understand which scent will free a person’s mind from his or her troubles.
Donohue found writing this magical touch intriguing. She says, “I didn’t realize how difficult it would be—the book really toes the line. There are a lot of magical elements, but it’s not a total fantasy world. It’s a contemporary world where a few people happen to have a little bit of an ability that others don’t.”
The Oceanview Home stands tall in the fictional Bantom Bay, California, which Donohue describes as “a sliver of a town that curves along the coast between the Pacific Ocean and the densely wooded Bantom Ridge, some 20 miles south of San Francisco.”
She adds, “I wanted to have the total freedom to make up this place and have it be this lovely little suburban heaven, but also still be near San Francisco and have all of those little elements peppering the story that I think help round it out a bit. I tend to like making up a place that is near real places.”
As in all her books, Donohue’s “Memory Gardener” characters are delightful, well-drawn and thought-out personalities, often trying to recapture something special in their life, if not find it for the first time. The cast of all ages includes a lovable giant dog and a sweet if sad little child.
She says her narrator/protagonist first came to her in the form of her gift, “and the idea of her having some backstory that makes it hard for her to use her gift the way she should be,” Donohue explains: “…. She came to me through many drafts of figuring out who she was and what she really wanted out of life, really needed out of life, and what others needed from her.”
The book’s other driving force is Fitz, a curmudgeon of an older man with hidden secrets. “Fitz has his own chapters, although they’re told through third person, so we’re not quite in his head so much,” Donohue says. “He was there for me from the beginning. Maybe because he doesn’t have magic, he was less complicated to figure out. But he’s one of my most favorite characters that I’ve ever written.”
Adam, a carpenter who restores historic structures and Lucy’s love interest, helps her understand her magical gift. Donohoe says, “Through his work in these older buildings, he feels the spirit and the soul of those places, which is something that can truly happen to people. You walk into a building, and you can feel the history there in some way. It’s like one of those real-life magical moments.
“I thought that him feeling those emotions so strongly would make him a really good partner for Lucy,” the author adds.
Donohue is working on another novel with magical features, though she doesn’t want to say too much about it, other than, “It does again involve plants and magic, and the sort of connection between real life magic and magic magic—where that line is between them and how we can cross it.”
Meg Donohue appears at 7 p.m. Dec. 5 at Books Inc., 2251 Chestnut St., San Francisco, and at 7 p.m. Dec. 9 at Rakestraw Books, 3 Railroad Ave., Danville. Visit megdonohoe.com.
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