My Garden [Hardcover]

Jamaica Kincaid (Author), Jill Fox (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

Jamaica Kincaid, author of Annie John, writes of gardens and gardeners in her most insightful and engaging book to date.

In My Garden (Book), Jamaica gathers all she loves about gardening and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer, but not winter, which is so unremittingly white. She adores rhododendron Jane Grant and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily and dreams of ways to trap small plant-eating animals. The sources of her inspiration-seed catalogues (the glossy ones and, even better, the nonglossy ones), legendary gardeners such as Gertrude Jekyll and Graham Stuart Thomas, famous gardens like Monet's at Giverny and Vita Sackville-West's at Sissinghurst-receive keen scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and considers the implications of the English formal garden in colonized countries; and she visits historic English gardens on English soil.

My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardeners who tend them.

Illustrations

Jamaica Kincaid's most recent book (as editor) is an anthology of writing on plants, My Favorite Plant (FSG, 1998). She lives in Vermont with her husband and children, and teaches at Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind's eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know and even now do not know." Celebrated novelist Kincaid (The Autobiography of My Mother) should delight fans of her fiction and connoisseurs of the literature of horticulture with this personable and brightly descriptive, if somewhat rambling, book-length essay, most of it about her own garden in Vermont. Kincaid (who last year edited the anthology My Favorite Plant) shuttles constantly and with ease between the practical, technical difficulties of gardening and the larger meanings it makes available. She asks herself why her new weeping wisterias won't look right on her stone terrace; why her Carpinus betulus Pendula looks so lonely amid poppies and "late-blooming monkshood"; what's wrong with roses, and what's good about Blue Lake green beans; and how to stack up stones. But she also coaxes from her plot of earth more philosophical and psychological questions--inquiries about geography, heritage, marriage, motherhood, power; "how to make a house a home"; whether and for whom "to name is to possess." Kincaid's Antiguan upbringing recurs as a point of comparison, a source of political insights and a focus of nostalgia: "it dawned on me that the garden I was making... resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it." A botany-centered trip to Kunming, China, gives the last chapter a welcome change of scene. Kincaid, her publisher and their designers have made of her meditations a remarkably attractive physical object, suffused outside and in by shades of green and decorated throughout with illustrations by Jill Fox. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Kincaid blends a fertile inner life, botanical and colonial history, gardening lore, and her long gardening experience to create a rich, rewarding read. She contrasts the colonial specimen plants of the botanical garden of St. John's, in her native Antigua, with the wild, unruly garden she's created at her current home in Vermont. This garden, says Kincaid, reflects her passions and interests. "When it dawned on me that the garden I was making... resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it... I only marveled at the way a garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of getting to a past that is my own." Kincaid is a hopeful, imaginative gardener who lazily pages through catalogs during the long Vermont winters and plans trips to China, Giverney, and Sissinghurst to further feed her passion for plants. "I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind's eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know. And this must be why: the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves, that any set idea of the garden, any set picture, is a provocation to me." Is her ideal possible? "I shall never have the garden I have in my mind but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized so all the more reason to attempt them."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 229 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; First Edition edition (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374281866
• ISBN-13: 978-0374281861
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,395,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jamaica Kincaid's works include, Mr Potter, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother, a memoir. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garden as metaphor, garden as garden, December 9, 1999

By 

DAMwriter "David Moore" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Garden (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the thickness of things, June 7, 2004

By 

aboyer (Des Moines, IA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Garden (Hardcover)

"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?

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A veritable Garden, December 7, 1999

By 

Kevin Sim - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Garden (Hardcover)

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.