My Garden

by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid invites us into her garden in this “irresistible stream of horticultural consciousness” (Michael Pollan).

Jamaica Kincaid’s first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book): , she gathers all that she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination.

Kincaid’s affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the 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. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up and where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and she considers the implications of the English idea of the garden in colonized countries. On a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show, 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Gardening, Memoir, Essays, Nature, Plants, Biography Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

About the author

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.

Reviews

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) is not your typical garden book delighting in discussing ways to improve the health of the soil and plants, often with personal success stories tethered to the factual discussions. The focus here is less on garden information (though there is a good bit of that, particularly in terms of garden catalogues and various specialty seeds and plants) than on what thoughts and observations the various gardens of Kincaid’s life, stretching back to her childhood in Antigua, generate. “The garden,” she writes, “is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).” The garden is also an exercise for her in trying to figure out how to garden in Vermont (a far cry from the Caribbean), as well as to ponder various large topics related to gardening, such as gardens and colonialism, the politics of naming plants, and the reach of the horticultural industry.

Gardens may be therapeutic for Kincaid, but she also underscores how troublesome they invariably are and how her own gardens rarely come to meet her expectations, her best laid plans for plants and their configurations never matching those alluring, beautiful pictures found in the seed and plant catalogues she loves to pore over. But for Kincaid that’s ok, because, well, that’s the nature of life and desire. “I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it,” she writes; “certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them. A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the owner and occupants wanted more.”

Oddly enough, then, the frustrations of the garden are what Kincaid relishes and what provide her the most joy. In a statement in which she clearly includes herself, she observes that “gardeners (the owners of gardens, the occupants of them, which is to say, the people who work in them) are so restless, so irritable, so constantly vexed, so happy in their unhappiness, so pleased that they cannot really be satisfied.” At another point she writes that some people thrive on being irritable, so that “a fixed state of irritation is oxygen.” She adds: “I understood this all too well.” Indeed, she does. Such irritation—at some points I’d even say crabbiness—circulates throughout her book, and you’ll have to judge for yourself how you feel about it. As engaging as Kincaid’s gritchiness can be, after a while I found it a bit wearing, more predictable than searching.

[Maria Kemplin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is in my heart, I read it like poetry. This has remained on my night table for 9 years now and will be there for many years to come. Kincaid doesn’t simply describe her favorite plants; she sketches out parallels between plants, botany, transplantation, and colonialism.
Edited to add: 20 years now and still my night table book

[Sasha]

Someone recommended her during a conversation about Shirley Jackson, although I'm not sure if it's because they're similar or just because Jackson gets a name check in See Now Then, which is probably the novel I should read first rather than this essay about gardening. But I like gardening!

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am about to move from a house with lots of established plantings to a house with a nice yard that clearly did not belong to a gardener. I only became obsessed with gardening once I moved to the South (which fits with Kincaid's reflections on southernness and tropicality throughout this memoir, which documents her experiences gardening in New England), and I still feel incompetent at it, even though I love it. So this book really appealed to me because Kincaid started gardening (as did I!) because she became a mother. For her, the gift of seeds and garden tools on Mother's Day launched an obsession; for me, my daughter's pre-K plastic cup with a cucumber seedling in it produced the same effect. From having very little interest in plants, I suddenly was obsessed with this miracle. (The metaphor is not lost on me.) What's wonderful about this book is not just Kincaid's critique of colonialism (which is indeed wonderful), or her connection of colonial rule to the practice of gardening (again--so good), but also her sort-of incipient grumpiness and aspirationalism about gardening. She just can't resist imagining how various plants will look, even though she knows that the weeding will be Sispyphean and that nothing will turn out quite as she imagines. She embraces the amateurish garden, the passionate gardener, the failed project, the tense relationship with wildness and entropy established by disciplining the yards we (temporarily, even as homeowners) live in. Her aphoristic style and Eeyore-ish affect were just right for me. I found myself scribbling her bon mots in my notebook because they fit so exactly my dream of a garden, my exultation in nurseries and seed catalogs, and the invariable falling short of that vision. I'm afraid it's going to sound hopelessly fuzzy to say so, but Kincaid is really writing about the invariable falling short of trying to make one's mark on the world. (yes, she is also writing about colonialism. And how much winter can be like death. And about how overwhelming irritating it can be to travel to China to gather seeds with a group of fellow tourists with whom you don't get along. Especially if you sprain your ankle.) I borrowed this book from the library, but I may have to buy a copy of my very own.

[Annetten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ytterligare en passande bok att läsa under pandemin och mitt uppe i odlarens mest efterlängtade tid i Sverige. Till skillnad från andra böcker jag läst inom växtgenren under våren skulle jag nog säga att denna nästan förutsätter växt-/trädgårdsentusiasm för behållning. Den innehåller mycket fint men en obehaglig sekvens om hennes tankar kring kaniner kontra orörd trädgård lämnar bitter eftersmak. Nästan så bitter att trean sitter hårt inne.

[Gretchen Rubin]

I have no interest in gardening, but enjoy reading gardening books. And I love the work of Jamaica Kincaid.

[Miri · Rating 2 out of 5]

she’s such a cranky gardner

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A better title might be “My Fallible Garden (Book)” given her ready admissions to mistakes, lack of (certain) knowledge and lackadaisical methods & style. Frustrated with plants that don’t bloom as they should (or at all!) and how so much of her garden just does as it pleases, with no regard to her intent. But what a garden she must have! As she walks us along paths, naming the flora as we go, it is lush, whimsical and as train-of-thought as her writing. I visualize a Pollock painting of scattered colors, unblending but unified in sheer gaiety. Free form.

Many notes on books (some, unrelated) catalogs, plants, garden trips, and critters. Well-rounded in that which is gardening. An easy read of ruminations, albeit a tad repetitive... still, a joy to chase away winter blues.

[Alasdair Pettinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quotation from Kirkus Review on the back cover of my copy calls this book 'quirky'. This is true, on different levels.

Perhaps the most distinctive formal feature is the deliberately excessive use of parentheses, as if the author has set herself the task of illustrating all the different purposes they can serve (clarifying an ambiguous pronoun, glossing an unusual word or phrase, explanation, qualification, specification of relationship, narrative digression, and so on), extending to the very title. It lends these essays an informal, conversational character - often marked by sudden changes of direction or swings of mood.

But the subject matter is highly unusual too. All the essays draw on Kincaid's experiences as an amateur gardener but it is no more a book about gardening than Beyond a Boundary is about cricket. 'What do they know of gardening who only gardening know?' could easily be its epigraph. If it is eloquent on the ways in which the gardener can take delight in the 'vexations and agitations' of her craft, and on the impulses that attract her to some plants and repel her from others, My Garden (book) offers various historical and cross-cultural perspectives that make for uncomfortable and provocative reading.

She dwells - some might say perversely - on the quotidian details of buying and selling, underlining the broader economic networks in which she operates (including her own privilege as the owner of a large house in Vermont who can afford domestic help). Having grown up in the Caribbean she is keenly aware of how precious the aesthetic pleasures of the domestic garden are when set alongside the mercenary priorities of plantation agriculture on the one hand and the imperialist 'botany thieves' (and the Latin nomenclature they imposed) on the other.

There are few moments of tranquility here. Her reflections on Spring are punctuated by the killing (or fantasies of killing) rabbits, snakes, bugs and slugs, but the contradictions are sharpest in the longest essay in the book, 'Plant Hunting in China'. As Kincaid describes the organized tour - her attention largely absorbed by the behaviour of her fellow-travellers, the unvarying diet of 'pork, pork, pork, pork', and the unsanitary conditions and practices she observes (and must herself occasionally endure) - she comes close to occupying the position of the tourist she famously despises in A Small Place. It certainly seems to confirm that she has now (as she puts it in another essay) 'joined the conquering classes.' And here perhaps any comparison with C L R James breaks down. But the book leaves us with much to reflect on.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I REALLY liked this book---as a gardener and as a reader. And since I had seen an interview with her, I also really liked her as a person. She details her advent into the world of gardening including her mistakes and her passions which are many, to the extent of visiting gardens around the world, traveling many distances to buy plants and even going to China on a seed-collecting tour. And of course, she orders so many plants from gardening catalogs that I can't begin to imagine the size of her gardens.

[Lara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just about hated the author by the end.

[Lisa]

I've been meaning to read this since The Bookstore podcast did an episode on it in Feb 2024, but it was disturbingly hard for me to get a copy of it. I felt very seen when the hosts said that listeners of the pod might not particularly like this one, and, I didn't! I completely agreed that I might have appreciated this more as standalone essays, but more importantly/relevantly, I'm not too into gardening. This book made me think about the absolute raves I've been hearing about The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise and how I wish I could appreciate books like this more? Gardening seems like such a fascinating lens to see the world, and yet, not for me. I would have enjoyed my mom's reflections on this book, especially the essay on plant gathering in China.

[Cora Galpern]

It took me a while to get into it but so luscious and fun once I was hooked. Plants ♥️🪴🌱🌸

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

hon är så smart, så kul och så sassy (ursäkta sista adjektivet)

[Debra Hale-Shelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely adore this collection of essays about the famous writer's own gardens. Jamaica Kincaid creates on paper and creates in the ground. I love her disdain for some flowers, her defense of others -- namely the Sweet Annie, one I bought myself a couple years ago simply because my daughter is named Annie. We planted it, and it grew like a weed -- just like Annie. I wrote an essay about Sweet Annie. .... Kincaid wants seed; she gets it, whether through seed catalogues or through a seed-collecting trip to China. She makes you want to get the wide-brimmed hat, garden gloves, hoe and dirt out and start a-planting.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for different reasons, which shift depending on the section of the book. This first section appealed to me as a gardener; Kincaid writes about her history with gardening, her gardens, and her homes. This section may appeal only to gardeners. The next section fascinated me because of Kincaid's focus on colonial history; she made intriguing connections between gardening and colonization. I think this section would appeal to and interest anyone. The last section was more of a travel journal and journey of self discovery as she traveled to China to gather seeds. Though I enjoyed the book, it would be more enjoyable for gardeners to read.

[Lizzytish · Rating 3 out of 5]

This pretty much sums up me: “ How agitated I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look the way I imagined (and this, thank God is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary. “

Basically a stream of consciousness regarding gardening. Sometimes the repetitiveness was too much for my liking.

[Michaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful! Not advice or hints on gardening, so don't look for them. But read it, regardless. You won't be able to anticipate what she might say about her garden. At times memoir, other times social/historical commentary, her ambivalent, unapologetically biased writing in this (book) is always delightful and powerful.

[cab · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In early September I picked and cut open a small, soft, yellow-fleshed watermelon, and I was suddenly reminded of the pictures of small girls I used to see in a magazine for girls when I was a small girl myself: they were always at a birthday party, and the colors of their hair and of the clothes they wore and of the light in the room were all some variation of this shade, the golden shade of the watermelon that I had grown. I would wish then to be a girl like that, with hair like that, in a room like that—and the despair I felt then that such a thing would never be true is replaced now with the satisfaction that such a thing would never be true. Those were the most delicious melons I have ever grown.”

This is such a beautiful book. I first got wind of Kincaid in one of the introductory chapters of a book on ecocriticism, where she was introduced as “The New Yorker’s first anti-colonial gardener” or something to that effect.

Kincaid’s prose is so beautiful and flows so well, this book melding personal history and gardening together seamlessly. It meanders, leisurely and winding like a river. Will definitely read more or her narrative fictions.

Note: I started reading it more than six months ago, and I am leaving it DNF in spite of my massive enjoyment of it as an acknowledgement that the moment has now passed.

[Kozbi BC · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Eden is like that, so rich in comfort, it tempts me to cause discomfort; I am in a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to share it." This book is full of complex, conflicting emotions and it is a beautiful read. I didn't like that Kinkaid viewed gardening as an aristocratic hobby but refused to turn that lens on herself; she portrayed herself as financially prosperous but also spoke of putting her family close to "bankruptcy" through her purchases of flowers and plants. Regardless, I loved experiencing how the author exists in the garden as the descendent of Antiguan slaves and now a black woman living in Vermont.

[Maria]

För mig är det bästa med att läsa när det får mig att tänka tankar jag aldrig tänkt förut och när dessa tankar får mig att förstå världen eller mig själv lite bättre eller på ett annat sätt. Den här boken har, förutom att den har inspirerat mig och fått mig att skratta, fått mig att inse att trädgårdsodling är politiskt.

[Linnéa Löfdahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

[Lisa]

Loved so hard.

[muturiina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aivan ihana kirja, välillä naurahdin hienoille ilmauksille ja välillä vaikutuin filosofisesta pohdinnasta. Runollista tajunnanvirtaa.
Ahmin kirjan muutamassa päivässä, aion lukea Kincaidin muitakin teoksia jatkossa.

[iara · Rating 2 out of 5]

this took me so long to read bc i just simply wasn’t interested in what she was writing about 😭 i liked the writing and one chapter about colonisation/slavery was interesting so that’s why it’s 2 stars not 1 lol

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underbar bok. Ljuvlig läsning. Fantastisk översättning.

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts… Whom should I ask what to do? Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.”

TITLE—My Garden Book
AUTHOR—Jamaica Kincaid
PUBLISHED—1999
PUBLISHER—Farrar, Straus and Giroux

GENRE—memoir essays
SETTING—Vermont, with flashbacks to Antigua, travels to foreign botanical gardens, & a “plant-gathering” trip to China
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—gardens, gardening & ungardening, maples, daylilies, wisteria, memory, heritage, honeysuckle, “What to do?”, bloom time, monkshood, seasons & seasonality, pond lilies, reading as a physical act, peas & potatoes, Vermont, magnolias, robins & woodpeckers, colonialism, american culture, hollyhocks, China, motherhood, non-nativeness, garden & seed catalogues, nurseries & garden centers, botanic gardens & museums

“What does a gardener need? I cannot say; I know only what I have needed in the garden.”

Summary:
“Jamaica Kincaid writes about her subject from an acute angle all her own. I get an enormous kick out of seeing where her lively pen is going to lead me.” — Eleanor Perényi, author of GREEN THOUGHTS: A WRITER IN THE GARDEN

My thoughts:
This book is the seventh book that Kincaid published, and the seventh we’ve read as part of the #WeReadJamaicaKincaid initiative (on Instagram) to read all of her books in order of publication.

MY GARDEN BOOK is a collection of memoir-ish essays all revolving to some degree around Kincaid’s journey into the realms of botanical cultivation and appreciation. The world of the garden functions as a mirror, reflecting and refracting back to Kincaid elements of herself, her experience, and her worldview as an Antiguan-American. Examining and exploring the themes of familial love, cultural heritage, aesthetic preference, wild beauty, seasonality, colonialism, displacement, the choices we make, and our lives’ purpose/s, among many others, Kincaid continues her insightful and engaging considerations of the human experience of the world around us.

Reading Kincaid’s GARDEN BOOK after reading most of her more well-known books, which all take on a more mythologized, more retrospective look at her past, other individuals in her life, etc., was also interesting because in contrast it gave such an intimate look into her life as it was *while* she was writing about it, when the influence of all of her previous books has had time to settle in her. I loved the humor, the honest self-criticism, the humility, the fearlessness, and the curiosity. She is somehow charmingly lighthearted and mercilessly opinionated all at the same time and I love how she continues to surprise me with each new read.

Although, whew! She has a *complicated* relationship with animals. 😅😬

I would recommend this book to readers who are fascinated by gardening and especially the philosophy of gardens, cultivation, botany, & agriculture and the many varied intersections between the natural world and the human experience. This book is best read outdoors.

“I have really learned this as a gardener: listen to everyone and then grow the things you love. I have learned as much through my own conceitedness and from my own mistakes as I have from all the great gardeners I have met.”

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

Season: Late winter—>Spring

CW // lots of descriptions of animal deaths (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- SOIL by Camille T. Dungy—TBR
- CABARET OF PLANTS by Richard Mabey
- ENTANGLED LIFE by Merlin Sheldrake
- Vita Sackville-West’s garden book—TBR
- I PUT A SPELL ON YOU by Nina Simone—TBR

I am personally a huge fan of anthologies of memoir-essays. A few of my favorites include:
- Akwaeke Emezi’s DEAR SENTHURAN (on their trans, embodied existence as an ogbanje & a Black creator)
- Audre Lorde’s SISTER OUTSIDER (which focuses on social justice issues)
- Thomas King’s THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES (on writing, Indigeneity, & the power of storytelling)
- Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS (on Indigenous spirituality & the natural world)
- Kathleen Jamie’s SURFACING (on archaeology & the cultural landscape)
- Sabrina Orah Mark’s HAPPILY (on Jewishness & motherhood)
- Alice Walker’s LIVING BY THE WORD (on writing)

Favorite Quotes—
“Oh, winter, what is it, anyway? What is it really, this thing where the air is cold, the trees are bare, and all beings, human or otherwise, look hungry, look as if there is not enough of anything and there never will be. But just then, just now (that summer, this summer! when the wisteria was blooming out of turn), the leaves of the trees had reached a green beyond which they could not go, they were only going to be green, certainly so, and the lawn would no longer be lush with grass, only untidy and overgrown and need cutting, and, and . . . Oh, the deliciousness of complaining about nothing of any consequence…”

“…the irritation to be found in the garden will not lead to any loss of face; it will only lead to this question: What to do? and the happiness to be found in that!”

“…that sort of settling down is an external metaphor for something that should be done inside, a restfulness so that you can concentrate on this other business, living…”

“A house has a physical definition; a home has a spiritual one.”

“The botanist said the trees were not of any real interest; just ordinary hemlocks, Norway spruce, pines. This botanist meant that there was nothing of botanical interest planted near my house, but he had never seen the youngest son of Robert Woodworth measure his grown self against the grown tree.”

“On this particular day the mail was mostly from my creditors (garden related), first gently pleading that I pay them and then in the next paragraph proffering a threat of some kind. But since there was no clear Dickensian reference (debtors' prison), I wasn't at all disturbed…”

“The grimness of winter for this gardener can be eased only by such things. On my night table now is a large stack of books and all of them concern the Atlantic slave trade and how the world in which I live sprang from it. The days will have to grow longer, warmer, and softer before I can pick one of them up.”

“It is winter and so my garden does not exist; in its place are these mounds of white, the raised beds covered with snow, like a graveyard, but not a graveyard in New England, with its orderliness and neatness and sense of that's-that, but more like a graveyard in a place where I am from, a warm place, where the grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth, because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes their actions are more significant, more profound than when they were alive, and so no square structure made out of concrete can contain them.”

“My copy of Peter Beale's Roses is tattered and smudged, because I read it while I am in the middle of planting or weeding or watering. I read it then because reading is the thing I like most to do and because I cannot imagine having an occupation that does not go along with reading, which is just as well, since I need an occupation to support my habit of reading… I read my books, but I also use them; that is, sometimes the reading is almost a physical act.”

“…that is why I regard Nina Simone's autobiography as an essential companion volume to any work of Vita Sackville-West's. There is no mention of the garden in Nina Simone's account of her life, as there is no mention of the sad weight of the world in Sackville-West's account of her gardening. One is a life so dramatic that it seems very difficult to dramatize; the other has so little drama in it that, long after it is over, there is nothing left but silly dramatizations. And yet, and yet, in the way that it is worthwhile for any aspiring jazz singer to listen to Nina Simone, it is worthwhile for any gardener to look at the garden through Vita Sackville-West's eyes.”

“The photographs of Giverny (quite different from the paintings) show everything in it to be overgrown, overtall, which is just the kind of garden I like, for I feel that it reveals a comforting generosity of spirit.”

“This is the luxury of a kitchen garden—growing things you cannot buy at the store.”

“Before a courtier named Charles Hamilton imposed order on this landscape, in 1738, it was just brush. After Hamilton, Painshill passed from owner to owner, hand to hand, until the Second World War, when it fell into disrepair and nature reclaimed it. Until twelve years ago, when a trust was created to preserve the site, it had returned to being just brush. It is part of the life of a garden, that because creating a garden is such an act of will, and because (if it is a success) it becomes the place of great beauty which the particular gardener had in mind, the gardener's death (or withdrawal of any kind) is the death of the garden.”

“I made an observation not original to me, not unlike the one my friend made when he called England an old suitcase: I was in a country whose inhabitants (they call themselves subjects, not citizens) do not know how to live in the present and cannot imagine living in the future, they can live only in the past, because it, the past, has a clear outcome, a winning outcome. A subdued nature is part of this worldview in which everything looks beautiful.”

“I found a biography of the Tradescants in which the author (Prudence Leith Ross) quotes Francis Bacon as saying: "Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn," and I could only think to myself that this was someone who never had to cut the grass himself.”

“For some people, a fixed state of irritation is oxygen.”

“Americans behave like this: half of them believe in and support strongly a bad thing their government is doing; the other half do not believe in and protest strongly a bad thing their government is doing. The bad thing succeeds and everyone, protester and supporter alike, immensely enjoys the results of the bad thing.”

“What if the people living in the tropics, the ones whose history isn't tied up with and contaminated by slavery and indenturedness, are content with their surroundings, are happy to observe an invisible hand at work and from time to time laugh at some of the ugly choices this hand makes, have more important things to do than making a small tree large, a large tree small, a tree whose blooms are usually yellow, black; what if these people are not spiritually feverish, restless, and full of envy?”

“There must be many ways to have someone be the way you would like them to be; I only know of two with any certainty: You can hold a gun to their head or you can clearly set out before them the thing you would like them to be, and eventually they admire it so much, without even knowing they do so, that they adopt your ways, almost to the point of sickness; they come to believe that your way is their way and would die before they give it up.”

“…the great loves of my then life. These great loves were all girls; for them to have been boys would have been a serious mistake, a mistake that would have, not might have, changed my life, for I knew either by instinct, or it had been drummed into me, that boys (who eventually grow into men) never think of consequences, never care about consequences unless it pleases them to do so, never indulge in the fantasies of pretending, and so must take everything to its logical conclusion, at which point they then move to take on another event and bring it to its logical conclusion.”

“This blankness, the one Columbus met, was more like the blankness of paradise; paradise emerges from chaos and chaos is not history, chaos is the opposite of the legitimate order of things. Paradise, then, is an arrangement of the ordinary and the extraordinary, but in such a way as to make it, paradise, seem as if it had fallen out of the clear air. Nothing about it suggests the messy life of the builder, the carpenter, the quarrels with the contractor, the people who are late with the delivery of materials, the whole project going over budget, the small disappointments to be found in details of the end result. This is an unpleasant arrangement, this is not paradise. Paradise is the thing just met when all the troublesome details have been vanquished, overcome; paradise is the place that does not hold any of the difficulties you have known before; it holds nothing, only happiness, and it never reveals that even happiness is a burden, eventually.”

“To read a brief account of the Dutch East India trading company in my very old encyclopedia is not unlike reading the label on an old can of paint. The entry mentions dates, the names of Dutch governors or people acting in the Dutch interest; it mentions trade routes, places, commodities, incidents of war between the Dutch and other European people, it never mentions the people who lived in the area of the Dutch trading factories, places like Ceylon, Java, the Cape of Good Hope are emptied of their people as the landscape itself was emptied of the things they were familiar with, the things that Linnaeus found in George Clifford's greenhouse.”

“…who has an interest in an objective standard? Who needs one? It makes me ask again, What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? And if so, what should history mean to someone who looks like me? Should it be an idea; should it be an open wound, each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again, over and over, or is it a long moment that begins anew each day since 1492?”

“Is it March where you both are? It is March here and winter is behaving like me when I am somewhere I like to be and can sense that I am making all my companions miserable by not behaving and not knowing it is time to leave.”

“Families are a malevolent lot, no matter the permutations they make, no matter the shape they take, no matter how beautiful they look, no matter the nice things they say.”

“…but in the end I came to know how to grow the things I like to grow through looking at other people's gardens. I imagine they acquired knowledge of such things in much the same way—looking and looking at somebody else's garden. But we who covet our neighbor's garden must finally return to our own, with all its ups and downs, its disappointments, its rewards. We come to it with a blindness, plus a jumble of feelings that mere language (as far as I can see) seems inadequate to express, to define an attachment that is so ordinary: a plant loved especially for something endemic to it (it cannot help its situation: it loves the wet, it loves the dry, it reminds the person seeing it of a wave or a waterfall or some event that contains so personal an experience...”

“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 and so all the more reason to attempt them. A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.”

“Is this Eden, that thing that was banished, turned out into the world as I have come to know it the world of discarding only to reclaim, of rejecting and then claiming again, the world of such longing that its end (death) is a relief?”

“…and then I was reminded of the garden Eden, the garden to which all gardens must refer, whether they want to or not. What turned wrong with Eden (from my point of view) is so familiar: the owner grew tired of the rigid upkeep of His creation (and I say His on purpose), of the rules that could guarantee its continued perfect existence, and most definitely tired of that design of the particular specimen (Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge) as the focal point in the center and the other configurations (alleys, parterres, orchards, potageries); the cottage garden, which is really an illustration of making the best of deep social injustice, as the ha-ha, a part of the gardening landscape, is an illustration of making something beautiful out of yet another social cruelty.”

“…all the sadness that comes with satisfaction.”

“…I have brought my family to the brink of bankruptcy just to have growing in my garden some treasure (to me) or another, something I felt I could not live happily in the garden without…”

“…for I had (have) come to see that a garden, to make a garden, is partly an attempt to do that, to bring in from the wild as many things as can be appreciated, as many things as it is possible for a gardener to give meaning to, as many things as it is possible for the gardener to understand… and accept that there are some things we cannot take because we just don't understand them.”

“Eden is like that, so rich in comfort, it tempts me to cause discomfort; I am in a state of constant discomfort and I like this state so much I would like to share it.”

[Anja Hildén · Rating 3 out of 5]

En sorts flödestext om att ha en trädgård. Fastnade inte riktigt hos mig (fast den borde). Intressantast är jämförelserna med kolonialismen och vad det betyder.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jamaica Kincaid, Vermont resident who teaches at Harvard, writes as though she is transcribing thoughts as they form in her brain...the longest sentences I've ever seen (and I've seen some long sentences)...about her passion gardening, her loosely constructed gardens at her home, the people who help sustain her garden and her travels to exotic places seeking seeds of the native plants of far lands.

[Jen Mercaldi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still reading it, but I'm really enjoying it. Will use it for reference when I actually have my own garden. She referrs to a lot of flowers she likes and good catalogs to order from. I absolutely love her writing style and this book doesn't dissapoint. It's a first edition, signed copy, so I can't loan it out - sorry!