My Garden Book (Hardcover)

by Jamaica Kincaid (Author), Jill Fox (Illustrator)

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: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #950,345 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #24 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > African American > Kincaid, Jamaica

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 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

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.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Kevin Sim (Singapore) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Tedious, December 30, 2000

By A Customer

I found Ms. Kincaid's book to be tedious. I learned little about gardening and by the end of it I determined if I ever had to travel with the women I might kill myself. She is extremely self-absorbed and her never-ending sentences a bore.