One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves
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 together all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same spirit: 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. The sources of her inspiration--seed catalogues (the glossy ones, and preferably, non-glossy ones), the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny--are subjected to her scrutiny. 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.
