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With blind, instinctive, and confused love,
for Annie
&
for Harold
who from time to time are furiously certain
that the only thing standing between them and a
perfect union with their mother is the garden, and
from time to time, they are correct
Table of Contents
Title Page
PART I
WISTERIA
THE HOUSE
THE SEASON PAST
READING
THE GARDEN IN WINTER
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
MORE READING
PART II
AN ORDER TO A FRUIT NURSERY THROUGH THE MAIL
THE OLD SUITCASE
TO NAME IS TO POSSESS
MONET’S GARDEN
WHAT JOSEPH BANKS WROUGHT
THE GLASSHOUSE
IN HISTORY
PART III
A LETTER TO DAN HINKLEY AND ROBERT JONES, THE PROPRIETORS OF HERONSWOOD NURSERY
SPRING
WHERE TO BEGIN?
PLANT HUNTING IN CHINA
THE GARDEN I HAVE IN MIND
THE GARDEN IN EDEN
ALSO BY JAMAICA KINCAID
JAMAICA KINCAID
Copyright Page
My attachment in adult life to the garden begins in this way: shortly after I became a mother for the first time, my husband gave me a hoe, a rake, a spade, a fork, some flower seeds to mark the occasion of that thing known as Mother’s Day. It was my second Mother’s Day; for the first one he had given me a pair of earrings and I put them on a table in the kitchen and they were never seen again, by me, nor anyone else, not the lady who cleaned the house, not the women who helped me take care of my child, not my husband, not my child—no one admitted to ever seeing them again. I can’t remember if the seeds and tools were wrapped up, but I can remember that immediately on having them I went outside and dug up a large part of the small yard, a patch that had never been cultivated, and put all the seeds in the packets in the ground. And that was that, for nothing grew, the ground was improperly prepared, it was in the shade of a big oak tree and a big maple tree (those two trees really did grow in the same vicinity and I did not appreciate them then; so annoying, their leaves falling down in the autumn and dirtying up the yard, I thought then).
A man named Chet lived in the house right next to me and he could breathe properly only while attached to canisters filled with oxygen; then every once in a while he would come outside and smoke a cigarette, and while smoking a cigarette he would tend to these enormous tomatoes that he grew right up against the side of his house. The tomatoes were exposed fully to the sun in that position and he did not worry about poisonous toxins leaching out of the materials from which his house was built into the soil in which his tomatoes were grown. His tomatoes prospered near his house and they tasted most delicious; my plot of back yard upturned by me, which had made my hands blistered and unpleasant-looking, looked as if an animal of any kind had mistakenly thought something was buried there and had sought in vain to find it; no one looking at the mess I had made would think that a treasure of any kind, long lost, had finally been unearthed there.
I moved into another house not too far away and with a larger yard. Chet died and I am still ashamed that I never saw him again after I left my old house, and also I never attended his funeral, even though I knew of it, and when I now see his wife, Millie, she avoids me (though I am sure I avoid her, too, but I would rather think that it is she who is avoiding me). I moved to a house which had been the house of someone named Mrs. McGovern and she had just died, too, but I never knew her or even heard of her and so moving into her house carried no real feeling of her for me, until one day, my first spring spent in that new house and so in that new property, this happened: the autumn before, we had paid someone a large amount of money to regrade the lawn out back and it looked perfect enough, but that following spring lots of patches of maroon-colored leaf sprouts began to emerge from the newly reconstituted lawn out back. How annoyed I was, and just on the verge of calling up the lawn person to complain bitterly, when my new neighbor, Beth Winter, came over to see me and to talk to me about how enjoyable she found it to live with her family of a husband and three children in the very same house in which she grew up; on hearing of my complaints about the lawn person and seeing the maroon-colored leaf sprouts I had pointed out to her, she said, “But you know, Mrs. McGovern had a peony garden.” And that was how I learned what the new shoots of peonies look like and that was how I came to recognize a maple, but not that its Latin name is Acer; Latin names came later, with resistance.
That first spring in old Mrs. McGovern’s house (but she was long dead) I discovered her large old patch of daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) growing just outside the south-west kitchen window and Rob (Woolmington) came with his modest rototiller and made a largish square with it for my vegetable garden and then followed me around the outside perimeter of the house with the same modest rototiller as I directed him to turn up the soil, making beds in strange shapes, so that the house would eventually seem to be protected by a moat made not of water but the result of an enthusiastic beginning familiarity with horticulture.
This is how my garden began; then again, it would not be at all false to say that just at that moment I was reading a book and that book (written by the historian William Prescott) happened to be about the conquest of Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, and I came upon the flower called marigold and the flower called dahlia and the flower called zinnia, and after that the garden was to me more than the garden as I used to think of it. After that the garden was also something else.
By the time I was firmly living in Mrs. McGovern’s house (or the Yellow House, which is what the children came to call it, for it was painted yellow), I had begun to dig up, or to have dug up for me, parts of the lawn in the back of the house and parts of the lawn in the front of the house, into the most peculiar ungardenlike shapes. These beds—for I was attempting to make such a thing as flower beds—were odd in shape, odd in relation to the way flower beds usually look in a garden; I could see that they were odd and I could see that they did not look like the flower beds in gardens I admired, the gardens of my friends, the gardens portrayed in my books on gardening, but I couldn’t help that; 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. 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.
It was not until I was living in Dr. Woodworth’s house (the Brown Shingled House with Red Shutters) some years later that I came to understand the shape of the beds. In Dr. Woodworth’s house, I had much more space, I had a lawn, and then beyond the lawn I had some acres. The lawn of Dr. Woodworth’s house was bigger than the lawn at old Mrs. McGovern’s house, and so my beds were bigger, their shapes more strange, more not the usual shape of beds in a proper garden, and they became so much more difficult to explain to other gardeners who had more experience with a garden than I and more of an established aesthetic of a garden than I. “What is this?” I have been asked. “What are you trying to do here?” I have been asked. Sometimes I would reply by saying, “I don’t really know,” or sometimes I would reply “ … . … . … .” (with absolute silence). When it da
wned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it, I did not tell this to the gardeners who had asked me to explain the thing I was doing, or to explain what I was trying to do; I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).
PART I
WISTERIA
Is there someone to whom I can write for an answer to this question: Why is my Wisteria floribunda, trained into a standard so that it eventually will look like a small tree, blooming in late July, almost August, instead of May, the way wisterias in general are supposed to do? The one that is blooming out of its natural season is blue in color; I have another one similar in every way (or so I believe), except that it should show white flowers; it does not bloom at all, it only throws out long, twining stems, mixing itself up with the canes of the Rosa ‘Alchymist,’ which is growing not too nearby, mixing itself up with a honeysuckle (Lonicera) and even going far away to twine itself around a red rose (Rosa ‘Henry Kelsy’). What to do? I like to ask myself this question, “What to do?” especially when I myself do not have an answer to it. What to do? When it comes up, what to do (slugs are everywhere) and I know a ready-made solution, I feel confident and secure in the world (my world), and again when it comes up, what to do (the wisteria are blooming out of their season), I still feel confident and secure that someone somewhere has had this same perplexing condition (for most certainly I cannot be the first person to have had this experience), and he or she will explain to me the phenomenon that is in front of me: my wisteria grown as a standard (made to look like a tree) is blooming two months after its usual time. Do standards sometimes do that at first, when they are in their youth of being standards, the whole process of going from one form (vining) to another (a shrub, a small tree) being so difficult and unusual; in trying to go from one to the other, does the whole process of holding it all together become so difficult that precise bloom time becomes a casualty, something like appearing at the proper time to have your hair examined by the headmistress: you show up but your hair is not the way it should be, it is not styled in a way that pleases her, it is not styled in a way that she understands. What to do with the wisteria? should I let it go, blooming and blooming, each new bud looking authoritative but also not quite right at all, as if on a dare, a surprise even to itself, looking as if its out-of-seasonness was a modest, tentative query?
But what am I to do with this droopy, weepy sadness in the middle of summer, with its color and shape reminding me of mourning, as it does in spring remind me of mourning, but mourning the death of something that happened long ago (winter is dead in spring, and not only that, there is no hint that it will ever come again). Summer does have that color of purple, the monkshoods have that color, and they start blooming in late July, and I have so many different kinds I am able to have ones that will bloom all the way into October; but monkshoods do not look sad, they look poisonous, which they are, and they look evil or as if they might hold something evil, the way anything bearing the shape of a hood would. I like the monkshoods, but especially I like them because friends whom I love through the garden (Dan Hinkley, Annie Woodhull) grow them and grow them beautifully, and they are always saying how marvelous it is to have that particular kind of color in the garden (deep purple) at that particular time of the year (deep summer, late summer) and I see their point, but deep down I want to know, why can’t there be a flower that is as beautiful in shape as the monkshood but in the colors that I like best: yellow, or something in that range. What should I do? What am I to do?
The supposed-to-be-white-blooming wisteria has never bloomed. I found two long shoots coming from its rootstock one day while I was weeding nearby and I cut them off with a ferociousness, as if they had actually done something wrong and so now deserved this. Will it ever bloom, I ask myself, and what shall I do if it does not? Will I be happy with its widish form, its abundant leafiness and the absence of flowers, and will I then plant nearby something to go with all that? What should I do? What will I do?
And what is midsummer anyway? What should I do with such a thing? I was once in Finland on the twenty-first of June, which was called midsummer, and I stayed up all night with some Finnish people and we went in and out of a sauna and we went in and out of a lake—the sauna was built on its shore—and then we went dancing at a place where there were some people who did not look like the Finnish people who were my hosts and the Finnish people called them Gypsies. And the Finnish people kept saying that it was in this way they celebrated midsummer, in and out of a sauna, in and out of a lake, dancing in a dance hall along with other people called Gypsies. The buddleia ‘African Queen’ is said (by Dan Hinkley in his catalogue) to bloom in midsummer, but it bloomed before the late (and false) blooming wisteria and it bloomed just after the date of midsummer in Finland; the buddleia ‘Potter’s Purple’ is blooming now in late July, but I had bought it because I thought it would bloom in late August to early September; and so what will I do then, when late August arrives (as surely it will, since I like it; but winter I do not like at all and so I am never convinced that it will actually return); to what can I look forward? The aster ‘Little Carlow’ (surely the most beautiful aster in the world) right now has formed flower heads, and they look as if they will bloom soon, any time now, but they bloom usually in late September to early October and they have a kind of purple/blue that makes you think not of sadness but of wonder: how can such a color be and what is that color exactly? What to do? The sedum, too, was about to bloom in late July, early August, and I am ignoring that the buddleia ‘Pink Charm,’ which blooms in early September and is planted especially for that, is about to bloom in late July, early August. What to do?
How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary. Why are those wonderful weeping wisterias (or so they looked in a catalogue: wonderful, inviting, even perfect) not fitting in the way I had imagined them, on opposite sides of a stone terrace made up of a patchwork of native Vermont stone? I had not yet understood and also had not yet been able to afford incorporating the element of water in my garden. I could not afford a pond, I could not understand exactly where a pond ought to go in the general arrangement of things. I do not even like a pond, really. When I was a child and living in another part of the world, the opposite of the part of the world in which I now live (and have made a garden), I knew ponds, small, really small bodies of water that had formed naturally (I knew of no human hand that had forced them to be that way), and they were not benign in their beauty: they held flowers, pond lilies, and the pond lilies bore a fruit that when roasted was very sweet, and to harvest the fruit of the lilies in the first place was very dangerous, for almost nobody who loved the taste of them (children) could swim, and so attempts to collect the fruit of pond lilies were dangerous; I believe I can remember people who died (children) trying to reach these pond lilies, but perhaps no such thing happened, perhaps I was only afraid that such a thing would happen; perhaps I only thought if I tried to reap the fruit of pond lilies I would die. I have eaten the fruit of pond lilies, they were delicious, but I can’t remember what they tasted like, only that they were delicious and that they were delicious, and that no matter that I can’t remember exactly what they tasted like, they were delicious again.
In my garden there ought to be a pond. All gardens, all gardens with serious intention (but what could that mean) ought to have water as a feature. My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon
series of doubts. What to do about the wisteria blooming out of turn (turn being the same as season)? And then just now I remember that I saw the Lycoris squamigera blooming also, and just nearby the (by now) strange wisteria, in late July, and it was at the foot of the wisteria; but it looked sickly, its bare stalk was stooped over, limp, its head of flowers opening almost, and then not at all. What to do? The lycoris had such a healthy flourish of green leaves resembling a headmaster’s strap first thing on a school morning, before it had met the palm of a hand or a buttocks (not bare buttocks, they were shielded by khaki), in the spring, so abundant were they, that they made me worry about the ability of the Anemone pulsatilla, which I had so desperately pursued (I loved the blooms, I loved what came after, the seed heads, which perhaps can be appreciated only if you like the things that come after, just that, the mess that comes after the thing you have just enjoyed). And still what to do? Whom should I ask what to do? Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.
But what to do? That year of the wisteria behaving not in its usual way, not in the way I had expected it to behave when I bought it based on its firm illustrious description in a catalogue, other events occurred. And so what to do? One afternoon, a proper afternoon, the sun was unobscured in its correct place in the sky, a fox emerged from my woodland (and it is my woodland, for I carved it out of the chaos of the wood and bramble and made it up so that it seemed like the chaos of the wood and bramble but carefully, willfully, eliminating the parts of a wood and bramble that do not please me, which is to say a part of wood and bramble that I do not yet understand). I had never seen a fox so close by at that time of day; I was startled (really, I was afraid of seeing something so outside my everyday in the middle of my everyday), I screamed; it is possible I said, “It’s a fox!” The other people who were in the house (the housekeeper Mary Jean and Vrinda) came out of the house and saw it also. When the fox saw us looking at him or her (we could not tell if it was a male looking for a spouse or a mother looking for nourishment), it just stood there in the shadow of the hedge (a not-accounted-for, yet welcome Euonymus alatus) looking at us, and perhaps it was afraid of our presence and perhaps it was curious about our presence, having observed us at times when we were not aware of it. The fox stood there, perhaps in the thrall of my shriek, perhaps never having heard such a thing as a shriek coming from the species to which I belong (I believe I am in the human species, I am mostly ambivalent about this, but when I saw the fox I hoped my shriek sounded like something familiar to the fox, something human). What to do when the fox looked at me as if he was interested in me in just the way I was interested in him (who is he, what is he doing standing there just a few steps from my front door, my front door being just a stone’s throw from where he/she might be expected to make a den). The fox, after looking at me (for a while, I suppose, though what is a while really?), walked off in that stylish way of all beings who are confident that the ground on which they put their feet will remain in place, will remain just where they expect the ground to be. The fox skipped through the soft fruit garden, that section of the garden that I have (it was a whim) devoted to fruits whose pits can be consumed whole with a benefit that Adele Davis (she is now dead) might have approved.
My Garden (Book) Page 1