My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  EARTHLY DELIGHTS

  What does a gardener need? I cannot say; I know only what I have needed in the garden. I am an absentminded person; that is, less charitably, I am a careless person, who mistreats her gardening equipment, leaving it to the elements—the rain, dew, and sun. I accidentally bury various digging or weeding utensils in mounds of dirt, and leave pruning shears, gloves, even plants somewhere that I mean to be a temporary resting place but that often turns out to be the place of their permanent abandonment. I use my books about the garden in almost the same way I use the other things connected to it. My copy of Peter Beale’s Roses is tattered and smudged, because I read it while I am in the middle of planting or weeding or watering. I read it then because reading is the thing I like most to do and because I cannot imagine having an occupation that does not go along with reading, which is just as well, since I need an occupation to support my habit of reading. Above all, I believe that anything you need, or love, you must have more than one or two of. Love itself must be had in such a large amount that it eventually causes you to be sick of it.

  Let me say again, I started to plant things—this is not the same thing as being a gardener—when, to celebrate my second Mother’s Day, my husband, on my daughter’s behalf, gave me some packets of seeds (I only remember delphiniums and marigolds), along with a rake, a hoe, and a digging fork, all bought from the Ames department store in Bennington, Vermont. I went outside, dug up the yard, and put the seeds in the ground. The skin on my right forefinger split, the muscles in the back of my calves and thighs were sore, and the digging fork broke; for all that, the seeds did not germinate, the yard of that house being mostly in the shade of old maple trees. Since then I have become a gardener, and here are some of the things I have come to love and need.

  Among the first things I acquired was a good set of hand tools—a trowel, a dibble, a cultivator, and a weeder. I believe I got those from Smith & Hawken. I do not now have that same dibble or that same cultivator; the ones I have now are from Langenbach, a gardener’s-tool outfit in Stillwater, New Jersey.

  A canvas bag designed for carrying such things is a good idea, especially if you can remember to put them in it to begin with; but any old bag will do quite well, just as long as it can take dirt and water and look the better for it. Ideally, my gardening bag contains lots of twine for tying things up and for marking out rows; a small pair of scissors for cutting the twine; a penknife; gloves and gloves, since in my experience no two of them ever make a pair (I can add that the ones from Womanswork, of York, Maine, are the best I have ever had); a box of wall nails specially designed for tacking up roses or other stout vines against a wall or a post; a small hammer, almost toylike in size; a wire cutter; a stapler, which is useful when I am making temporary fences in the vegetable garden for vines of one sort or another to run up; wooden labels; and an indelible-ink marker.

  A visit to a botanical garden or a museum is another kind of gift for a gardener. A most unexpected example might be a visit to the Botanical Museum at Harvard, to view the fruits and flowers made of blown glass which are on display there. The specimens of fruit are shown at various stages of development, from blossom to their full ripeness, and then in various stages of decay and disease; the specimens of flowers, however, are shown without any blemish at all. These fruits and flowers, decaying or unblemished, are all beautiful, and, as is the way of likenesses, seem more representative of the real than do the things that they are meant to resemble. The creation of these simulacra is also an almost defiant assertion of will: it is man vying with nature herself. To see these things is to be reminded of how barefaced the notions of captivity and control used to be, because the very fabrication of these objects, in their perfection (no decay or blemish in nature is ever so appealing) and in the nature of the material from which they are made, attests to a will that must have felt itself impervious to submission. How permanent everything must feel when the world is going your way! It was in this museum that I discovered a book by the botanist Oakes Ames, who in his day knew a great deal about orchids. It is called Jottings of a Harvard Botanist. Ignore the introduction and the foreword, one by his daughter, the other by his grandson—yes, staple the pages together, as I do to the introductions of all books I am going to read. Oakes Ames is a personality you want to meet as if by accident, on some mode of public transportation (and leave him there). He was a nineteenth-century man of European descent: his sense of possession is funny now only because he is dead. On his way to Cuba, to visit Harvard’s botany station there, he wrote this to his wife, Blanche: “We are surrounded by the usual uninteresting people one meets on a journey to Cuba and back; people who are well enough to watch, but undesirable to meet.” This is the kind of confidence you have when the world is yours.

  And this brings me to books, which are the things I most like to get. They are also, regrettably, the things that I am given only one of, because it must seem ridiculous to give somebody more than one copy of the same book. Yet I would very much like to have two copies of The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book—one for when I am sitting inside my house, dry and comfortable, and one for when I am tramping around my garden in the rain and mud, or walking through the sprinkler while it’s on. I read my books, but I also use them; that is, sometimes the reading is almost a physical act. All of Graham Stuart Thomas’s books are books every gardener should have, not only because he is so knowledgeable but also because he is deliciously authoritative and overbearing in his opinions, the way people who really know their business can’t help being. And surely all of us, especially gardeners, must have someone whose advice and opinions we go against, even at our plants’ peril. Thomas’s Rose Book (his The Old Shrub Roses, Shrub Roses of Today, and Climbing Roses Old and New have been combined into this one volume and reprinted by Sagapress/Timber) is perhaps the essential book for a gardener interested in roses. It is not encyclopedic, like the Peter Beale’s, but is limited to the roses Thomas knows well. Personal experience and botanical history blend in his sentences: “Well remembered, too, is the day on which I purchased my first rose—‘Mme Caroline Testout,’ followed by other Hybrid Teas, now outclassed; they were recommended by an uncle who was something of a connoisseur, and in whose garden every rose bore, to my great satisfaction, a cast metal label.” I’ve found that when I’m reading this book a copy of the Pickering Nurseries catalogue (of Pickering, Ontario) is good company. Sometimes his description is so tempting (he says this about ‘Guinée’: “deepest murrey with crimson centre, pure, unfading, without purple; beautiful shapely flowers and intense red-rose fragrance”) that I want to have the rose being described; often I can find it in the Pickering catalogue.

  My fascination with the authoritative and the overwhelmingly confident compels me also to share my love of Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia, by Donald Wyman, America’s Garden Book, by James Bush-Brown and Louise Bush-Brown, and all books by Gertrude Jekyll. With Wyman, the bullying begins in the first sentence: “A pleasing, well-grown garden reflects the personality of its owners, living proof that they have an interest and enthusiasm for growing plants, that they have an inherent feeling for design and good color combinations, and that they have a knowledge of horticulture.” With the Bush-Browns, the bullying begins in the title: America’s Garden Book. Can there then be any other? Obviously not. With Jekyll, the bullying sounds like this: “Every year that shows the experience gained by recent observation in the arrangement of plants for colour, confirms the conviction of the great value of a judicious use of what, for want of a better name, I know as the ‘between’ plants—plants that are not for bloom, but for some quiet quality that shall combine with and enhance the colouring of those that are near.” I cannot resist anyone who can write such a sentence.

  I have been to Sissinghurst; I have read Jane Brown’s Sissinghurst: Portrait of a Garden; all the great gardeners I know love this garden and everything connected to it, especially its creators, Vita Sackville-West and her husband. It is a beautiful ga
rden, an extraordinary creation. And yet I remain unmoved by it. Perhaps that is because I have read too much of Sackville-West’s own writing. The best of her garden writing has been collected by Robin Lane Fox, an extraordinary gardener himself, in an anthology called The Illustrated Garden Book. I suspect that the source of my antipathy to Sackville-West and her garden is to be found in her observations of the garden, in the way she manages to be oblivious of the world. For the fact is that the world cannot be left out of the garden. At least, I find it to be so: that is why I regard Nina Simone’s autobiography as an essential companion volume to any work of Vita Sackville-West’s. There is no mention of the garden in Nina Simone’s account of her life, as there is no mention of the sad weight of the world in Sackville-West’s account of her gardening. One is a life so dramatic that it seems very difficult to dramatize; the other has so little drama in it that, long after it is over, there is nothing left but silly dramatizations. And yet, and yet, in the way that it is worthwhile for any aspiring jazz singer to listen to Nina Simone, it is worthwhile for any gardener to look at the garden through Vita Sackville-West’s eyes.

  The painter with the best-known garden is, of course, Claude Monet. Everyone I have ever met who has a garden has something growing in it from seeds that were gathered in Monet’s garden. Usually, it is hollyhocks. This makes sense: the seeds of hollyhocks are very easy to steal. (When I was going through a public garden in Ukraine this September, I saw some hollyhocks whose bloom appealed to me, so I stole a number of seeds and brought them home in an almost empty box of sanitary pads.) I have seen Monet’s garden in books. Such books are everywhere, certainly in the houses of people who have something of Monet’s growing in their garden. The photographs of Giverny (quite different from the paintings) show everything in it to be overgrown, overtall, which is just the kind of garden I like, for I feel that it reveals a comforting generosity of spirit. So it will seem perverse of me to recommend a book of garden paintings not by Monet but by one of his patrons and contemporaries, Gustave Caillebotte. The book, Caillebotte and His Garden at Yerres, shows a garden that in feeling is almost the opposite of Giverny. Caillebotte was a well-off man, and his garden has the circumspection of wealth, the order that money can buy. The most evocative painting is of a perfectly aligned row of vegetables under tilted glass cloches, behind two men in bare feet watering what look like heads of lettuce.

  I can also recommend packets of seeds from Thompson & Morgan, but only the seeds of plants that would be difficult to find elsewhere. Just for instance, they offer Meconopsis betonicifolia, M. napaulensis, M. cambrica (Welsh poppy), and a really vulgar beauty, M. cambrica ‘Frances Perry.’ Because anything as unusual as Meconopsis will be hard to bring to the seedling stage, I suggest that to make a gift like this complete you send the seeds to an agreeable and expert grower who lives not too far from you, so that your plants can be easily picked up and put out for planting in the spring. I have such a person in Jack Manix, of Walker Farm, in Dummerston, Vermont. Last January I sent him twelve different kinds of foxglove seeds I’d bought from Thompson & Morgan, not one of them available through any plantsman that I know of; I picked up the seedlings from Jack in May, planted them in my garden, and look forward to seeing them in bloom next spring.

  Among the other things that I would welcome—and so, I imagine, would my fellow gardeners, or at least the gardeners who are at my lowly stage of development—are: tree peonies (to be had from Klehm Nursery); unusual rhododendrons, azaleas, or kalmias (from Mr. Carlson, at Carlson’s Gardens, in South Salem, New York); roses, especially old ones, and not the David Austin’s and not the modern hybrid tea roses; some terra-cotta pots from the Masini family in Impruneta, Italy; a subscription to Gardens Illustrated (of London), the best magazine about gardens being published now; and membership in the Royal Horticultural Society. (This will allow free admission to Wisley, which is useless if you are not living nearby, but the free subscription to the society’s magazine, The Garden, is the real benefit, wherever you live.)

  If you are reading this with a gardener in mind and find that the suggestions for gifts are so various as to leave you undecided, or are put off by the fact that roses and peonies are dormant right now and cannot be shipped until spring, here is what you can do: draw a picture of the thing you are planning to give, put the picture in an envelope, and write the words “To Come” on the outside. It will do very well. An integral part of a gardener’s personality—indeed, a substantial amount of a gardener’s world—is made up of the sentiment expressed by the two words “To Come.”

  MORE READING

  On the day the temperature was 10 degrees below zero, the Ronniger’s Seed Potatoes catalogue arrived and that was the cheeriest thing, for I then spent the afternoon sitting in a bathtub of hot water, trying to satisfy a craving for overchilled ginger ale and oranges, and reading this little treasure. It is the most beautiful catalogue I receive each year; it is simple, like a Methodist hymn (I was brought up a Methodist and I am thinking of the first hymn that was in my child’s hymnal, “All Things Bright and Beautiful”), plain, straightforward, humble, and comforting—the exact opposite of the White Flower Farm catalogue, which is sumptuous, showy, and expensive-looking. Ronniger’s is printed on newsprint, and it has photographs that might have been taken with a not very good camera, or by someone who was not a particularly good photographer, or possibly a combination of the two, but they are adorable, the photographs. They are of people doing something with potatoes, or of machinery used in the cultivation of potatoes, or of potatoes just by themselves, in a bowl or some other kind of household container. It is a catalogue only of potatoes and a few other things that might enhance the flavor of a potato (onions, garlic, salt) or might make a potato grow better (a cover crop of alfalfa or clover). There is a particularly appealing picture of a young boy gathering potatoes; he has a look of blissful concentration on his face, as if the world outside the cultivation of the potato were completely closed to him. But this is only conjecture on my part; this is only my reading something into a picture I am looking at while sitting in a tub of hot water and drinking cold ginger ale and eating oranges; it could very well be that this boy is deeply familiar not only with the cultivation of the potato but with its history, with the crucial part it played in his ancestors’ diet and, therefore, their development as a people.

  The process of receiving and reading catalogues may not be as important to my garden as my weeding is, but that is the way I begin the gardening year. Actually, first I despair that there will never be a gardening season again, and then just when that conviction sets in, the seed and plant catalogues start to arrive. The very big, showy ones like the White Flower Farm and Wayside Gardens catalogues are psychological lifts: I never read them; I only look again and again at the pictures. The best catalogues for reading are not altogether unlike wonderful books; they plunge me deep into the world of the garden, the growing of the things advertised (because what are these descriptions of seeds and plants but advertisements), and that feeling of being unable to tear myself away comes over me, and there is that amazing feeling of love, and my imagination takes over as I look out at the garden, which is blanket upon blanket of white, and see it filled with the things described in the catalogue I am reading.

  It is in such a state that I read the Ronniger’s Seed Potatoes catalogue. Here is a description of that early-maturing potato called the ‘Dazoc’: “Talk about a delicious red potato … we found this one in our neighborhood on the Moyie River Road, grown since 1953 by Bud Behrman, who claims it came from North Dakota and has long since disappeared from commercial markets. Yet, he and his brother have zealously kept it going over the years. Round red deep eyes, excellent flavor, delicious baked and great hash browns, stores well. Bud and family eat them ‘til the next crop produces new potatoes.” This seemingly straightforward description of a kind of potato provided me with many hours of deliberation and fantasy: How many kinds of early-maturing potatoes can I grow this
year? Should ‘Dazoc’ be among them? Surely a potato grown by someone named Bud Behrman and eaten regularly by him and his family must be a good potato. And the Behrmans—who are the Behrmans? I imagined the Behrman family as the nicest people ever. When I was young and living far away from my family, my life was almost completely empty of domestic routine, and so I made a fetish of the way ordinary people in families lived inside their homes. I read women’s magazines obsessively and would often cook entire meals (involving meats in tins and frozen vegetables) from the recipes I found in them. One year I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner that was the same Thanksgiving dinner a family somewhere in the Midwest ate every year. This meal was featured in one of the magazines I read all the time, and the portrayal of these people and their food was so compelling to me that not only did I make the entire meal, but after Sandy Frazier and I ate it, I called up the Midwestern family and told them what I had done; they seemed perplexed and flattered. I then wrote a “Talk” story for The New Yorker about the whole episode, which I believe brought to an end that particular expression of alienation in my life. It was the memory of this that made me not order the ‘Dazoc’ potato but remain content with simply imagining the Behrmans and their potato dinners.