My Garden (Book)

Jamaica Kincaid is a literary artist and now I know she is also a gardener par excellence. The writing is typical beautiful Jamaica Kincaid. Interwoven with personal reflections of her journeys to visit gardens around the world with the Latin names for plants throughout are Kincaid's depiction of life as an immigrant to the US, marriage and parenting, writing (of course!), and the essential role of plants as an inspiring spirit in her life. You will love this book.

What a strange book this is. What a strange person this is, who has written this book. What a strange presentation of herself this is, by the person who has written this book. Latin name, Latin name, Latin name, anger, annoyance, complaints!!!

She deals with change of season, the gardener's annual struggle with planning and planting, visualizing... Her meditations cover a range of social, historical, and personal history.Very personal, not a how-to planner---gardeners will recognize the inevitable disappointments, the ongoing optimism, as well as the insights regarding human manipulation of the natural world.

Jamaica Kincaid is not exactly romantic about her gardens. In her garden writing, Kincaid connects the dots between hollyhocks and cotton and paints a not-so-pretty picture that casts aside romantic garden notions and excavates deep-rooted issues like colonial- ism, slavery, socioeconomic class and prejudice.In "My Garden (Book)," published in 1999, Farrar, Straus and Giroux paid attention to design. This beautiful book includes decorative borders, artful illustrations, leafy dingbats. Kincaid, who formerly wrote for The New Yorker, provides another angle on gardening as a political act.:Garden path leads to surprising places - The Denver Post [...] Read more

I found this book at a library book sale and bought it because of the subject (I enjoy garden writings immensely) and because of the loveliness of the book itself.The first story about a wisteria that won't bloom at the proper time is the only story I didn't like. The author repeated the sentece "What to do?" so many times that it got on my last nerve. Her writing in that piece seemed to be the meanderings of her thoughts that she then attempted to give a heavy-handed poetic touch. I enjoyed the rest of the pieces.This book is not typical of garden books and Jamaica Kincaid puts in bits and pieces of her life, touching on racial issues and gardener snobbery. Some sentences widen the eyes and make you read it again because it is so unexpected, tidbits that most other authors would self-censor. The author can come across as a bit offensive, particularly when branding various people "ugly", and I'm not sure if she would be a difficult person to know or a fun person to know - maybe both, but I definitely enjoyed her writings and am glad I didn't let her wisteria story deter me from reading the rest of the book.

Good service! But don't like the book

"Oh, how I like the rush of things, the thickness of things . . ."Oh, how I like Kincaid's My Garden (Book). I am halfway through it and realize I had better slow down, because I am not going to find another book on the garden I like nearly so much as this one, probably for a very long time. I've got a stack of other books, none so good, and I will use My Garden (Book) like a tiny slice of truffle among the more common and less delicious food on my plate. Rationing is the only option.What I like about her (among the everything else I like about her) is that she doesn't like Asiatic Lilies because their colors remind her of a hallucinogenic drug she took once ever seven days for a year when she was young. This is the best sort of confession to make in a gardening book.She also confesses to amassing large debts and threatening letters from creditors about her garden habit. She confesses to being a messy, careless person with a messy house. All these confessions endear her to me. The weaknesses balance the austere authority of her prose, which also endears her to me.Her garden aesthetic - odd, overgrown, intense and personal, wild, even, endears her to me. I remember reading a bit of memoir in the New Yorker that involved her experiments with coffee enemas. This struck me as the strangest thing I had ever read (because perhaps I was still a teenager in Kansas and ready to be struck by things). Enemas? The reason for them escaped me, but with coffee none the less - or espresso? I paid careful attention to the byline of that piece, wanting to find more of this sort of writing.Later, one of her essays was in a book I used as a graduate teaching assistant. When I saw her name, I took a sip of coffee.I like Ms. Kincaid because she doesn't love the writing of Vita Sackville-West. She says that the best literary companion to Vita's gardens is the autobiography of Nina Simone. How could this not be love? The best companion to life is Nina Simone and gardening like Vita Sackville-West.How could I not see bringing Ms. Kincaid a bouquet of flowers in exquisite yellows and sharing a cocktail in some overgrown, wild garden someday? How could I not tell everyone I know who enjoys the garden or good writing to pick up this book immediately and fall in love?

Kincaid is a wonderful writer and her views about plants she likes and dislikes are described with verve. This is not the book for you, though, if you want a 'how-to' book about gardens, nor if you want a 'why-to' book. If ideas about finding your place in the world and how it relates to colonialism and race interest you, however, it is a book to read. I found it intermittently intriguing, and certainly now know a lot more about the interests and character of the author than I did before.