Customer Reviews

My Garden (Book)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I must confess to having never read any of Ms. Kincaid's earlier work, but having enjoyed this book as much as I did, I will certainly seek out her other writings.

This book is an open, descriptive peek into the pleasures and peeves of gardening, and into Ms. Kincaid's own idiosyncratic - alternately heartwarming and annoying - view of herself, her family, her friends and acquaintances, and history. It takes the "garden as metaphor for life" theme into entirely new and thought-provoking directions.

Her style (writing as the novice Kincaid reader that I am) was unusual - very conversational, sometimes rambling and disjointed - and took some getting used to. But once I got into the essays, I found it entirely engaging. She delivers an honest appraisal of her strengths and her weaknesses, as a gardener and as a person. Her enemies (insect, animal and human) became my enemies, her heroes became my heroes (I've registered for a symposium featuring Dan of Heronswood Gardens already!), and her ideas never failed to generate my own questions and (sometimes) answers.

I highly recommend this book, as an adjunct to the winter plant catalogues and "how-to" books into which we addicted gardeners usually immerse ourselves during the "off" season. No great font of gardening information (by her own admission, she usually breaks the mold, if not the rules), it will not fail to inspire your own efforts come spring.

"Oh, how I like the rush of things, the thickness of things . . ."

Oh, how I like Kincaid's My Garden (Book). I am halfway through it and realize I had better slow down, because I am not going to find another book on the garden I like nearly so much as this one, probably for a very long time. I've got a stack of other books, none so good, and I will use My Garden (Book) like a tiny slice of truffle among the more common and less delicious food on my plate. Rationing is the only option.

What I like about her (among the everything else I like about her) is that she doesn't like Asiatic Lilies because their colors remind her of a hallucinogenic drug she took once ever seven days for a year when she was young. This is the best sort of confession to make in a gardening book.

She also confesses to amassing large debts and threatening letters from creditors about her garden habit. She confesses to being a messy, careless person with a messy house. All these confessions endear her to me. The weaknesses balance the austere authority of her prose, which also endears her to me.

Her garden aesthetic - odd, overgrown, intense and personal, wild, even, endears her to me. I remember reading a bit of memoir in the New Yorker that involved her experiments with coffee enemas. This struck me as the strangest thing I had ever read (because perhaps I was still a teenager in Kansas and ready to be struck by things). Enemas? The reason for them escaped me, but with coffee none the less - or espresso? I paid careful attention to the byline of that piece, wanting to find more of this sort of writing.

Later, one of her essays was in a book I used as a graduate teaching assistant. When I saw her name, I took a sip of coffee.

I like Ms. Kincaid because she doesn't love the writing of Vita Sackville-West. She says that the best literary companion to Vita's gardens is the autobiography of Nina Simone. How could this not be love? The best companion to life is Nina Simone and gardening like Vita Sackville-West.

How could I not see bringing Ms. Kincaid a bouquet of flowers in exquisite yellows and sharing a cocktail in some overgrown, wild garden someday? How could I not tell everyone I know who enjoys the garden or good writing to pick up this book immediately and fall in love?

I first picked up Kincaid's 'At the bottom of the river' last August. I just returned to homeland after 5 years away, saw the book on the floor of a bookshop, picked it up and ended up bringing it home. Since then, I have read all of her books.

This novel continues to do great justice to its predecessors. Illuminating, alive and vivid.

This is not a book about only gardening, but about everything. Poignant, funny, opinionated. It is a book that entertains and informs, in between the discussion of gardens and people with gardens.

I love gardens, but I don't have a green thumb. I don't why I picked this book up, but I did. This work does not detail the Latin names for plants or teach you how to layout your garden designs based on climate and soil conditions. It is a voyage of discovery of the self through the tending of a garden. An intriguing concept well written by Jamaica. Through her knowledge and experiences as a gardener, she began to understand her history, thoughts, decision-making, home, desires, fears, everything that makes her a woman, with a family, living on earth. Do not read this book for tips on gardening. Read this book for personal insights through the tending and building of gardens in connection to one's mind, body, soul, and heritage.

I've read some of Ms Kincaid's short stories and enjoyed them, and I love gardening books, especially essays. I bought this book thinking "How can I miss!" Unfortunately, in spite of the pretty cover, I did not find the book particularly interesting or appealing. Ms. Kincaid simply does not know enough about the subject to write about it. She is no Allen Lacy, Henry Mitchell, Adrianne Higgins, Diane Raver, or Elizabeth Lawrence. Don't fall into the trap I did of assuming because she can write well, she can write about gardening. If I had seen the book in the book store, I would have known it was "fluff" by flipping through a few pages.

I've read other books that were equally useless and dull, and I suppose I held Ms. Kincaid to a higher standard since she writes so well. My advice to her would be to follow the rule of good writing, stick to what you know.

I was sitting in a tire repair shop awaiting bad news and reading Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden to while away the time. Suddenly, the young technician approached to tell me that things were not so bad after all - and better yet, he informed me that I was reading a GREAT book! Who would have thought to receive a recommendation on a gardening book from a kid with axle grease on his hands!

He went on to explain that his teacher had assigned the book in his writing class at the local college, and he found it enchanting. (That wasn't his choice of words, but you get the drift.)

And indeed, it was an enchanting read. From her poetic mastery of the English language, to her transplanted Caribbean viewpoint, Kincaid writes from a different place - and don't we read at least partly to hear a different voice? Touching softly upon some very strong political sensibilities, Kincaid makes you think about earth's garden of souls as well as plants.

Gardening is one of the "loves" of my life, and the garden is where I do my serious thinking about another one of my great "loves"-reading. This book is delicious!!! As Joseph Campbell said, "Reading takes or opens doors to places that you've not yet traveled." Ms. Kincaid pushed me in a direction so rewarding that I marvel at her ability to express so well man's relationship with and desire to garden. For those of you who couldn't see or get the big picture, I say read it again with an open mind. My reflections on her musings will keep me happily digging in the dirt for quite a while.

If Jamaica Kincaid's book were a garden, it would be a very weedy one indeed. I've enjoyed her occasional pieces on gardening for The New Yorker, but I quickly guessed (and a check in the front of the book confirmed) that the book is a compilation of pieces that have been published elsewhere. How else to account for the wearying repetition of names, places, incidents, and (worst of all) thoughts? There are some bright spots, particularly Kincaid's meditations on English and Antiguan gardens, and thus on the relationship between colonizer and subjects. However, even this subject becomes, as its themes are repeated, tedious. It's hard to say who this book is intended for. Even non-gardeners may enjoy an occasional piece about gardening, but how does such a reader know what Kincaid is talking about when she describes (more than once, I assure you) what a White Flower Farm catalog looks like or why a Festiva Maxima peony is beautiful? And if you are a gardener, one truly interested in growing flowers (Kincaid says little about growing vegetables), you will find no tips or helpful advice here, just endless rhetorical questions. Finally, Kincaid's meandering style is better for short pieces than for a book. By the time I reached the incredibly self-absorbed account of her trip to China, I began to sympathize with the tour leader she maligns. This book is one for the compost heap, I'm afraid. Too bad---the graphic design of the book is quite lovely.

I liked it; I liked it very much. Contrary to the opinion of one of the other reviewers, it is not a showing off exercise for latin knowledge, and any self respecting gardener will empathise with thoughts of rabbit destruction when gazing upon the obliteration of a carefully planned and expensively nurtured border. I thought it was an enchanting read, particularly the descriptions of the visits to the Chelsea Flower show and Jamaica's reactions to the various eminent English garden luminaries encountered there! Maybe I am biased, but she likes the same plants I do, and I had the magical feeling of my own problems and loves materialising before my eyes on print. So there, to the grouch who only gave it one star! OK, so she doesn't have the extensive encyclopaedic knowledge of a plant biology PhD, but that would be missing the point. Most of us don't - we just like gardening, and gaining bits of knowledge as we go and grow. One of my current faves.

Jamaica Kincaid is not exactly romantic about her gardens. In her garden writing, Kincaid connects the dots between hollyhocks and cotton and paints a not-so-pretty picture that casts aside romantic garden notions and excavates deep-rooted issues like colonial- ism, slavery, socioeconomic class and prejudice.
In "My Garden (Book)," published in 1999, Farrar, Straus and Giroux paid attention to design. This beautiful book includes decorative borders, artful illustrations, leafy dingbats. Kincaid, who formerly wrote for The New Yorker, provides another angle on gardening as a political act.

Read more:Garden path leads to surprising places - The Denver Post [...]