My Garden

"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?

Gardening is one of the "loves" of my life, and the garden is where I do my serious thinking about another one of my great "loves"-reading. This book is delicious!!! As Joseph Campbell said, "Reading takes or opens doors to places that you've not yet traveled." Ms. Kincaid pushed me in a direction so rewarding that I marvel at her ability to express so well man's relationship with and desire to garden. For those of you who couldn't see or get the big picture, I say read it again with an open mind. My reflections on her musings will keep me happily digging in the dirt for quite a while.

I love gardens, but I don't have a green thumb. I don't why I picked this book up, but I did. This work does not detail the Latin names for plants or teach you how to layout your garden designs based on climate and soil conditions. It is a voyage of discovery of the self through the tending of a garden. An intriguing concept well written by Jamaica. Through her knowledge and experiences as a gardener, she began to understand her history, thoughts, decision-making, home, desires, fears, everything that makes her a woman, with a family, living on earth. Do not read this book for tips on gardening. Read this book for personal insights through the tending and building of gardens in connection to one's mind, body, soul, and heritage.

I must confess to having never read any of Ms. Kincaid's earlier work, but having enjoyed this book as much as I did, I will certainly seek out her other writings.This book is an open, descriptive peek into the pleasures and peeves of gardening, and into Ms. Kincaid's own idiosyncratic - alternately heartwarming and annoying - view of herself, her family, her friends and acquaintances, and history. It takes the "garden as metaphor for life" theme into entirely new and thought-provoking directions. Her style (writing as the novice Kincaid reader that I am) was unusual - very conversational, sometimes rambling and disjointed - and took some getting used to. But once I got into the essays, I found it entirely engaging. She delivers an honest appraisal of her strengths and her weaknesses, as a gardener and as a person. Her enemies (insect, animal and human) became my enemies, her heroes became my heroes (I've registered for a symposium featuring Dan of Heronswood Gardens already!), and her ideas never failed to generate my own questions and (sometimes) answers.I highly recommend this book, as an adjunct to the winter plant catalogues and "how-to" books into which we addicted gardeners usually immerse ourselves during the "off" season. No great font of gardening information (by her own admission, she usually breaks the mold, if not the rules), it will not fail to inspire your own efforts come spring.

I first picked up Kincaid's 'At the bottom of the river' last August. I just returned to homeland after 5 years away, saw the book on the floor of a bookshop, picked it up and ended up bringing it home. Since then, I have read all of her books.This novel continues to do great justice to its predecessors. Illuminating, alive and vivid.This is not a book about only gardening, but about everything. Poignant, funny, opinionated. It is a book that entertains and informs, in between the discussion of gardens and people with gardens.