My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid
"My Garden" by Jamaica Kincaid is a reflective exploration of the author's personal experiences with gardening, rather than a traditional gardening manual. The narrative weaves together her evolving relationship with gardens, beginning from her childhood in Antigua and continuing through her adult life in New York and Vermont. Kincaid's journey into gardening, initially sparked by her children's births, reveals her struggles with the practicalities of plant care and the reality of horticulture versus her idealized visions.
The book is structured in a way that evokes a meandering stroll through a garden, incorporating anecdotes about her travels to famous gardens, such as those of Claude Monet and Vita Sackville-West, while also reflecting on the historical context of gardening, including colonial influences. Kincaid's candid and often humorous insights highlight the emotional complexity of gardening, from frustration and disappointment to joy and discovery.
Her narrative delves into broader themes, including the impermanence of gardens and the deep connection between humans and nature. As Kincaid shares her trials and triumphs, the reader is invited into a rich tapestry of gardening life, celebrating the beauty and challenges of cultivating both plants and personal identity. This book appeals to those interested in personal essays, gardening, and the intersections of culture and nature.
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My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1999
Type of work: Nonfiction
The Work
Gardeners who open My Garden (Book) looking for descriptions of the proper way to cultivate tomatoes or to propagate roses are doomed to disappointment; instead, Kincaid offers readers a rambling history of her relationship with her own gardens. Along the way, she comments on other gardeners, seed companies, travels to garden shows, and expeditions to find new plants. The resulting picture is of Kincaid herself, by turns generous and bad tempered, willful and openhearted, helpful and demanding, and always a truthful if eccentric voice.
Transplanted first from Antigua to New York and then to Vermont, Kincaid had little interest in gardening until her children were born, although she had a keen awareness of the botany of Antigua, which she had studied as a child. Kincaid’s early ventures in gardening were marked by her lack of basic information about what will grow in Vermont, the varying needs of the plants that she has chosen, and how to make a plan that will produce the garden she sees in her imagination. They are issues that most gardeners face, and Kincaid is disarming as she describes her naïve expectations, her frustrations with plants that behave differently from their descriptions in the catalogs, and her encounters with nurserymen (some helpful, some quite the opposite). The book’s organization suggests a ramble through a garden; although it is roughly chronological in its history of Kincaid’s gardening, it offers a number of detours through other topics as well, including the story of how she and her husband obtained their house and the solace that she finds in studying the catalogs and speculating on their promises during the long months of snow in Vermont (it is not surprising that Kincaid has no love for winter).
Several chapters concern Kincaid’s horticultural travels. In England, she attends the Chelsea Garden Show and visits famous gardens, such as Vita Sackville-West’s garden at Sissinghurst. In France, she visits the painter Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny. These visits lead her to consider the role that colonial rule (starting with Christopher Columbus) has played in the importing of plant species, the fact that no garden can truly outlive its creator, and the eternal contrast between the ideal garden and what one has actually produced.
The last chapter records a plant-hunting trip to China that Kincaid made with a number of botanists and nurserypeople looking for new species, foreshadowing a similar trip later to the Himalayas. China is fraught with discomforts, and Kincaid is frank about her bad temper during much of the trip; the discomforts and temper seem to outnumber the plants. Still, Kincaid charms when she acknowledges in another context that many of her opinions and decisions rest on very little substance. Moreover, throughout the book she communicates the appeal of gardens and their ability to call everyone who loves them back to Eden.
Bibliography
Als, Hilton. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Review of Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid. The Nation 252 (February 18, 1991): 207-209.
Broeck, Sabine. “When Light Becomes White: Reading Enlightenment Through Jamica Kincaid’s Writing.” Callaloo 25 (Summer, 2002): 821-844.
Garis, Leslie. “Through West Indian Eyes.” The New York Times Magazine 140 (October 7, 1990): 42-44.
Jaggi, Maya. “A Struggle for Independence.” The Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1991, 20.
Matos, Nicole C., and Kimberly S. Holcomb. “’The Differences Between Two Bundles’: Body and Cloth in the Works of Jamaica Kincaid.” Callaloo 25 (Summer, 2002): 844-857.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Snell, Marilyn. “Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings.” Mother Jones 22, no. 5 (September/October, 1997): 28.
Valens, Keja. “Obvious and Ordinary: Desire Between Girls in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (June, 2004): 123-150.