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A review by ceallaighsbooks
My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid
funny
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.5
“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.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death