Amazon.com Review
This anthology edited by novelist
Jamaica Kincaid is a fascinatingly quirky compilation of writings about plants by the people who love them. Some are exceedingly practical--Ken Druse's essay "Desire Under the Jacks" gives you all the information you need to grow
Arisaema triphyllum from seed--while others are more lyrical, such as Colette's writings on lilies and hellebores, and the poetry scattered among the essays.
Like a magazine, there are pages you may skip over because you find the subject or style doesn't appeal to you, only to find yourself riveted by the next piece of writing, which awakens in you a lust to own a plant, the existence of which you were unaware of a few minutes earlier. The very best writing opens your eyes to something new: an experience, an object, a place, or in this instance, a plant. Every type of gardener, novice, expert, or dreamer will find such writings within these pages.
With its compact format, this is a book that can be slipped into the pocket and dipped into in those moments that become available between life's many activities, or put next to a guest bed for the enjoyment of visitors. The idiosyncratic typeface may not appeal at first, but you will get used to it. --Stephanie Donaldson
From Publishers Weekly
Author and gardener Kincaid believes that "[m]emory is a gardener's real palette... as it summons up the past... shapes the present... [and] dictates the future." For many, specific plants evoke specific memories; gathering 35 brief essays and poems that have been written throughout this century, Kincaid has compiled a bouquet of these plants and their corresponding memories. In "Lily," Colette remembers placing the eponymous white flowers around a statue of Mary, who "would be brushing, with the tips of her dangling fingers, the long, half-open cayman jaws of a lily at her feet." Czech writer Karol Capek writes in "Buds," published in 1929, that for him, even if he went out into the country, he would "see less of the spring than if I sat in my little garden" in Prague. Poet Maxine Kumin shares her appreciation of non-flowering plants and confesses that "nothing looks prettier to me than a well-tended flourishing vegetable garden." Ian Frazier, in "Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener," divulges how, after years of weeding gardens in his suburban childhood, he came to appreciate the activity, and when visiting "gardening friends... ask[s] what weeding needs to be done." In one of the strongest entries, "Marigold," Hilton Als admits hating that flower. During one childhood summer when his mother was ill, he recalls, he ate dirt from the marigold bed, to which his father devoted all his attention, and developed ringworm. Kincaid hopes that readers will draw some satisfaction from this collection, because a "garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy." In this she has succeeded, by presenting a book that is often beautiful, though some of its parts are not as radiant as others, and a few have yet to blossom.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.