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.


From Booklist
Kincaid's exuberant writing style complements her wide-ranging ruminations on gardens and the pursuit of gardening. Plant life is mysterious; specimens that should flower but do not do so raise questions that beg to be answered. Winter is not Kincaid's cup of tea, but the season allows time to enjoy inspirational seed and plant nursery catalogs. Insofar as her involvement in making a garden goes, Kincaid acknowledges both "satisfaction and despair." Readers who garden will recognize those feelings as the predictably contrary states of mind when we cultivate the land. Kincaid tours London's Chelsea Flower Show, Monet's Giverny, and Gertrude Jekyll's Munstead Wood, and she recalls unusual plants and observes the behavior of individuals from the past and the present. Still, Kincaid's views extend beyond the musings found in your usual garden journal. She ponders the history of slavery, the arrogance of the ruling classes, and the fact that ornamental gardens are a luxury, offering a great deal to savor and reflect on. Altogether, a fascinating cornucopia to consort with on nights when the garden is at rest. Alice Joyce


From Kirkus Reviews
A quirky, entertaining, and richly emotional look at the inner life of one particularly introspective and perceptive gardener. Kincaid (My Brother: A Memoir, 1997; The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996; etc.), a native of Antigua transplanted to Vermont, says of her own garden, which resembles a map of the Caribbean, that it is an exercise in memory. Memories and history figure large here. The sight of a hollyhock, one of her favorite flowers, stirs unhappy childhood memories of harvesting cotton, its close relative, and leads her into a pain-filled discourse on history. Books and reading, too, are at the center of Kincaid's work: books about gardens and gardening and books on horticulture and botany, but most of all seed and plant catalogues, the gardeners' wish books. For Kincaid, the grimness of the long Vermont winter is eased by the joy of catalogues, especially the plain ones without color pictures and captions. One of the book's most memorable scenes is of Kincaid on a ten-below-zero day sitting in a tub of hot water eating oranges and reading Ronniger's Seed Potatoes catalogue. Her description of plant hunting in China, where she spent a month with other plant enthusiasts gathering seeds in remote areas, is both witty and poignant, and there are thoughtful visits to Monet's garden at Giverny and Vita Sackville-West's famous English garden, Sissinghurst. Kincaid's unique style, replete with odd parentheses (the title, for example), asides, deliberate repetitions, and rhetorical questions, draws the reader into her personal world of anxieties, hopes, and joys. Kincaid has given her fellow gardeners something far more engrossing than seed catalogues to look forward to this winter. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review

Kincaid's ruminations on gardening provide the framework for the book. In the lyrical and poetic style that has become this author's trademark, she enumerates her many frustrations with her Vermont garden: wisteria that is blooming out of season, choices of placement and arrangement that do not fulfill her expectations, and mischievous beetles ("I plot ways to kill them but can never bring myself to do it"). Fellow gardeners will commiserate with the regret expressed over missed opportunities -- not ordering a particular seed when it was available or planting a new treasure too early or too late. But even an inexperienced gardener can tell that these complaints are part and parcel of the obvious passion that Kincaid feels for her hobby. Ironically, this passion is most gloriously apparent in the section on the garden in winter, which is described as "a graveyard" that leaves its keeper "almost in a state of disbelief." The reader gets the impression that the dormancy of her garden is perhaps the impetus for Kincaid's other creative outlet -- her writing.

In fact, Kincaid's musings on her garden are so charming, so full of childlike wonder, yet still laced with the humor and appreciation of an adult, that they alone could sustain this book. But like the garden that meanders and seems to be without a discernible pattern, so too the author's thoughts roam from one subject to the next, from the story of the acquisition of her current home to Monet's flower garden at Giverny. Particularly interesting are her reflections on her native home, the island of Antigua in the West Indies. It is in Antigua -- a place that she describes as, "green, green, green, and green again" -- that a love of gardens and plants and things that are green begins to grow inside this author. In a way, Kincaid's childhood memories do as much to explain how she came to be a writer as they do to explain how she came to be an avid gardener.

Equally intriguing, though, is Kincaid's brief appraisal of the so-called discovery of Antigua by Christopher Columbus. Kincaid wryly observes: "That it is new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it, does not occur to him." Such brief but keen observations are typical of this book, as Kincaid touches down upon one topic and then another, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower in her garden. Two other figures of interest to the author are the botanists Carolus Linneaus and George Clifford, and so Kincaid adds them to her historical detour -- as always, within the framework of their relation to her personal history. Actually, a great deal of the charm of Kincaid's ramblings is in her frequent interjections, almost as if she is interrupting her own train of thought to poke fun at herself or her subject.

Kincaid devotes a portion of My Garden (Book) to the community of gardeners of which she is a part. References to her fellow gardeners and various nursery-owners are sprinkled throughout the book in the same way that the names of one's relatives and friends seep into conversation. With great delight, she tells of her many seed catalog purchases -- which ones were successful and which were vexing failures. One of the most delightful parts of the book is a section describing her trip to China on a seed-collecting expedition, with a group of nursery-owners and botanists, during which she experiences acute homesickness for her family in Vermont. Here, Jamaica Kincaid the storyteller takes over and fully overshadows Jamaica Kincaid the gardener, and the result is quite humorous.

Much like the garden Kincaid describes near the beginning of her book -- the garden that is full of oddly shaped mounds and unusual patterns that seems to have neither rhyme nor reason -- this book is a scattered and colorful contemplation of many things, told from the vantage point of a gardener. But like Kincaid's garden, a higher design ultimately emerges. After planting her flowerbeds based on her whims and fancies, Kincaid realized that she had planted a landscape based on the geography of the islands of the West Indies. In the same fashion, what emerges from this narrative is a fertile arrangement of the many thoughts of a truly artistic, perceptive, and creative mind, infused with humor. Jamaica Kincaid's garden makes an exceptionally enjoyable book.

—Karen Burns

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 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, the 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.

Jamaica Kincaid's most recent book (as editor) is an anthology of writing on plants, My Favorite Plant (FSG, 1998). She lives in Vermont with her husband and children, and she teaches at Harvard University.

FROM THE CRITICS

Linda Wesley - Fine Gardening

This is not your typical gardening book, but then, Jamaica Kincaid is not your typical garden writer. An acclaimed novelist and Harvard English professor, Kincaid, it turns out, is also a fanatical gardener. For anyone who relishes garden literature, My Garden (Book) is an unexpected treat, something akin to discovering a patch of Fritillaria persica in spring you'd forgotten you'd planted in fall.

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 Cahners Business Information.

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 Cahners Business Information.

Megan Harlan

Thanks to Kincaid's luxuriant insights it's a robust hybrid of memoir and gardener's journal.

Entertainment Weekly

Burns

November 1999

Jamaica's Garden

It is one thing to wax philosophical about one's garden -- to offer poetic homage to the fruit of the earth and of one's own labors. But it is a rare gift to be able to capture the inner workings of a creative mind through the lens of a beloved hobby and render both with remarkable insight and wit. This is the achievement of Jamaica Kincaid's latest work, My Garden (Book).

Kincaid's ruminations on gardening provide the framework for the book. In the lyrical and poetic style that has become this author's trademark, she enumerates her many frustrations with her Vermont garden: wisteria that is blooming out of season, choices of placement and arrangement that do not fulfill her expectations, and mischievous beetles ("I plot ways to kill them but can never bring myself to do it"). Fellow gardeners will commiserate with the regret expressed over missed opportunities -- not ordering a particular seed when it was available or planting a new treasure too early or too late. But even an inexperienced gardener can tell that these complaints are part and parcel of the obvious passion that Kincaid feels for her hobby. Ironically, this passion is most gloriously apparent in the section on the garden in winter, which is described as "a graveyard" that leaves its keeper "almost in a state of disbelief." The reader gets the impression that the dormancy of her garden is perhaps the impetus for Kincaid's other creative outlet -- her writing.

In fact, Kincaid's musings on her garden are so charming, so full of childlike wonder, yet still laced with the humor and appreciation of an adult, that they alone could sustain this book. But like the garden that meanders and seems to be without a discernible pattern, so too the author's thoughts roam from one subject to the next, from the story of the acquisition of her current home to Monet's flower garden at Giverny. Particularly interesting are her reflections on her native home, the island of Antigua in the West Indies. It was in Antigua -- a place that she describes as, "green, green, green, and green again" -- that a love of gardens and plants and things that are green began to grow inside this author. In a way, Kincaid's childhood memories do as much to explain how she came to be a writer as they do to explain how she came to be an avid gardener.

Equally intriguing, though, is Kincaid's brief appraisal of the so-called discovery of Antigua by Christopher Columbus. Kincaid wryly observes: "That it is new only to him, that it had a substantial existence, physical and spiritual, before he became aware of it, does not occur to him." Such brief but keen observations are typical of this book, as Kincaid touches down upon one topic and then another, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower in her garden. Two other figures of interest to the author are the botanists Carolus Linnaeus and George Clifford, and so Kincaid adds them to her historical detour -- as always, within the framework of their relation to her personal history. Actually, a great deal of the charm of Kincaid's ramblings is in her frequent interjections, almost as if she is interrupting her own train of thought to poke fun at herself or her subject.

Kincaid devotes a portion of My Garden (Book) to the community of gardeners of which she is a part. References to her fellow gardeners and various nursery owners are sprinkled throughout the book in the same way that the names of one's relatives and friends seep into conversation. With great delight, she tells of her many seed catalogue purchases -- which ones were successful and which were vexing failures. One of the most delightful parts of the book is a section describing Kincaid's trip to China on a seed-collecting expedition, with a group of nursery owners and botanists, during which she experiences acute homesickness for her family in Vermont. Here, Jamaica Kincaid the storyteller takes over and fully overshadows Jamaica Kincaid the gardener, and the result is quite humorous.

Much like the garden Kincaid describes near the beginning of her book -- the garden that is full of oddly shaped mounds and unusual patterns that seems to have neither rhyme nor reason -- this book is a scattered and colorful contemplation of many things, told from the vantage point of a gardener. But like Kincaid's garden, a higher design ultimately emerges. After planting her flower beds based on her whims and fancies, Kincaid realized that she had planted a landscape based on the geography of the islands of the West Indies. In the same fashion, what emerges from this narrative is a fertile arrangement of the many thoughts of a truly artistic, perceptive, and creative mind, infused with humor. Jamaica Kincaid's garden makes an exceptionally enjoyable book.

--Karen Burns