My Garden (Book)

Jamaica Kincaid

Macmillan, May 15, 2001 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 pages

One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves.Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book): she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it 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 rhododron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book): is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.

Contents

• I: 14
• Wisteria: 22
• The House: 28
• The Season Past: 49
• Reading: 59
• The Garden in Winter: 65
• Earthly Delights: 77
• The Garden I Have in Mind: 216

About the author

Jamaica Kincaid came to the United States in 1966 as a free-lance writer and is now on staff at the New Yorker. Her first volume of stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), depicts men and women alienated from each other by conflict, physical separation, or death. The story "My Mother" vividly describes the painful separation between mother and daughter; and the stories in Annie John (1985) clearly reveal that the world of the past cannot be recaptured. Kincaid's poetic use of language and everyday images allows the reader to experience ordinary events with a new and heightened sensitivity. Kincaid is a relatively new writer whose works are beginning to receive critical attention.

Bibliographic information

• Title: My Garden (Book)
• Author: Jamaica Kincaid
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Macmillan, 2001
• ISBN: 0374527768, 9780374527761
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; Gardening / Essays & Narratives; Gardening / Fruit; Gardening / General; Gardening / Reference; Gardening / Vegetables; Literary Criticism / Women Authors