My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  Outside the tent were gardening tools and furniture—and the show gardens. In a garden called Wildflower and Seaside Garden (it won the Fiskars Sword of Excellence for the best garden at Chelsea that year), burdock was featured prominently, and then and there I began to look forward to the day when I might see a kind of burdock growing in a garden in England and be so filled with longing for it that I would consider, again, breaking the law. And in another show garden I saw the rose ‘Rambling Rector’ in full bloom, and it made me wish that Peter Beale lived in America, because he sells real roses, including this rambler—the kind that would actually survive in the climate I occupy (which, to me, is a real climate). Also, his book about roses is very good, so full of help. It was by now a beautiful afternoon, and I would have plowed on, but I saw something that made me feel like going to my hotel for a rest. To commemorate the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth, the magazine Country Living sponsored a garden filled with flowers she liked, and growing more or less in a scheme that the people at the magazine believed she would have approved of. And that was fine, except that they had hired an actress to portray Jekyll, and this woman—wearing Edwardian clothing—made Jekyll look feeble and stingy, as if she had just been removed from a time capsule: damp, full of mildew, not at all like the great artist she was, the great eccentric who always managed, somehow, to deflect close scrutiny. A few days later, in Godalming, Surrey, when I visited Munstead Wood, the house she had Edwin Lutyens build for her, and I was standing in her bedroom, I realized anew how false was that brittle portrayal of her. Everything about the house, with its big rooms, its wide hallway, the specially chosen light wood used for stairs and beams, the wonderful views of woodland and rhododendrons and azaleas and walks and flower beds to be seen from the window, had the texture of sensuality and passion and generosity.

  The following morning, before returning to Chelsea, I was reading the newspaper, and after turning away from the extremely unsympathetic opinions of a man with a name (Peregrine Worsthorne) that sounded like an old-fashioned purgative given to children and made from a herb now cultivated only in a physic garden, I came upon an article about a woman who holds the national collection of pelargoniums. She was upset because most people (and until very recently I was one of them) do not know that pelargoniums and geraniums are not the same thing or—to put it coarsely—that geraniums are the ones you can leave outside, while pelargoniums are the ones that must be brought inside, the ones with scented leaves, the ones in window boxes, the ones that turn black when the first frost hits them. She said that before the war (she did not say which war, the British have been involved in many wars, but it is a small country so everyone must know which one “the war” is) people didn’t call a pelargonium a geranium, but when the gardeners went away to war the distinction was lost. This, of course, dominated my experience for the rest of the day. If when the gardeners went away, the world of plant differentiation fell apart, what else might have fallen apart? And what did she really mean to say, this woman? If only the world—especially the gardeners—had stayed put? And then I missed my children less, because they always think it’s my fault when things don’t work out. But there is a big difference between a mother and a gardener.

  That day at the flower show, I saw another beautiful grouping of Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson’ at the stand run by Hopleys Plants, and I later read in their catalogue that the nursery had been the first to introduce the flower, in 1991. Barbara Barker, who runs Hopleys with her husband, is a very kind person. She encouraged my enthusiasm, and it was her soothing voice I heard when I read in the catalogue: “We should like to thank all those people who have kindly given us plant material over the years. Do you perhaps have a plant you think we should grow—we would be pleased to swop.” This was another lovely day spent among gardeners—gardeners, I kept thinking, who had replaced those who had willy-nilly gone off to war yet who didn’t know how to make a new arrangement with the world when the old arrangement no longer worked. Because, also that morning, I had read in yet another newspaper an article by the editor, congratulating himself for having loudly raised the question whether or not the monarchy should be abolished, and to myself I’d thought, People in his position used to help run the world, used to make the heads of millions of people like me spin just by turning a page; now he is reduced to asserting how brave he is for asking a ridiculous question. That evening when a friend called to wish me a happy birthday (I had turned forty-four), I was telling him all this, and he said that once when he was flying over England, he looked down on it and said to himself, God, this looks like the world’s oldest suitcase. He did not say what feature in the landscape, architectural or natural, had led him to think that.

  No American should go to England without reading Thomas Jefferson. It has become almost impossible for me to think of the two things I like most, history and gardening/botany, without thinking of him, and when I was in England I wanted to visit a garden he had visited. Painshill Park was one of the places he and John Adams went to see on a gardening tour they took together in 1786, while they were negotiating a trade treaty. I learned this from a woman named Eleanor McPeck, who is a garden historian and teaches landscape design at Radcliffe. She had said that, of all the gardens Jefferson saw in England, he liked Painshill Park, in Cobham, Surrey, best. (One of the nice things about hearing her talk about Thomas Jefferson is the way she will say, “Jefferson did this” and “Jefferson was”—this use of his name not implying a phony intimacy but acknowledging that she and he are two citizens on the same public footing.) I am sure it’s true that Jefferson loved Painshill, but it is hard to tell this from his own writing. A transcription from his journal reads:

  Painshill—Three hundred and twenty-three acres, garden and park all in one. Well described by Whately. Grotto said to cost £7,000. Whately says one of the bridges is of stone, but both are now of wood, the lower sixty feet high: There is too much evergreen. The dwelling house built by Hopkins, ill-situated: he has not been there in five years: He lived there four years while building the present house. It is not finished: its architecture is incorrect. A Doric Temple, beautiful.

  What Thomas Jefferson saw then was the English landscape at its most beautiful, its most manipulated, its most contrived, its most convincing; how vexed and disappointed we become with nature for not actually looking this way. There was a vineyard at Painshill which produced grapes from which wine was made; there was a man-made lake, a Gothic ruin, a mausoleum, a Turkish tent, a grotto, a Temple of Bacchus. Before a courtier named Charles Hamilton imposed order on this landscape, in 1738, it was just brush. After Hamilton, Painshill passed from owner to owner, hand to hand, until the Second World War, when it fell into disrepair and nature reclaimed it. Until twelve years ago, when a trust was created to preserve the site, it had returned to being just brush. It is part of the life of a garden, that because creating a garden is such an act of will, and because (if it is a success) it becomes the place of great beauty which the particular gardener had in mind, the gardener’s death (or withdrawal of any kind) is the death of the garden. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy; time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.

  On the day I saw it, Painshill was in the process of being restored. This is a good thing, in its way, but there was also a layer of sadness to it. When I was talking to the people involved in its restoration, they spoke about it in a way that implied it was a part of the national heritage, and I thought that something crucial had been lost over time: the sense of the place not as some sort of national park but as a piece of land a man arranged out of who knows what psychological impulses. I made an observation not original to me, not unlike the one my friend made when he called England an old suitcase: I was in a country whose inhabitants (they call themselves subjects, not citizens) do not k
now how to live in the present and cannot imagine living in the future, they can live only in the past, because it, the past, has a clear outcome, a winning outcome. A subdued nature is part of this worldview in which everything looks beautiful.

  That same afternoon, I saw Munstead Wood. The woman who now lives there (she introduced herself as Lady Clark; I childishly managed to spend the entire time I was there not calling her anything) has installed a swimming pool at the end of Jekyll’s old nut walk. She has been criticized for doing this—but why should she have to live in the Gertrude Jekyll House Museum?

  There actually is such a thing, a Museum of Garden History, in London. It is in an old church in Lambeth, and in the churchyard there the Tradescants (of Tradescantia, or spiderwort), John the Elder and John the Younger, are buried. The Elder was the first real gardener to become a personality in England, and the Younger had been to Virginia for the purpose of bringing plants back to England with him. It was their tomb that I wanted to see, not for any particular reason—just curiosity—but their tomb led me to some other things that are of interest to me. The Tradescants, father and son, are buried together, and the tomb next to theirs holds Captain William Bligh, his wife, his twin sons, and a grandson. There was a small knot garden of dwarf box in the middle of the churchyard, and it is the only knot garden I have ever seen that did not make me feel despair. Inside, in the bookshop, I found a biography of the Tradescants in which the author (Prudence Leith Ross) quotes Francis Bacon as saying: “Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn,” and I could only think to myself that this was someone who never had to cut the grass himself. The exhibition in the museum was about Gertrude Jekyll, again having to do with how long ago she was born. It had everything you would expect: her tools, letters, photographs of her family, and so on—but only two things really interested me. One was Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening boots. Anyone who has bought those stupid, uncomfortable clogs or the rubber boots that are advertised in garden catalogues should see these: strong, sensible, and comfortable-seeming leather boots, which were studded on the bottom with iron to make them last. They looked like a well-loved home. The other thing was a copy of her brother Walter’s book of songs, which he wrote in tribute to the people of Jamaica. He did not like black people, so naturally, he had to go and live among them. For some people, a fixed state of irritation is oxygen. I understand this all too well.

  When I got home myself, I found my pansies committing suicide; they were in desperate need of deadheading. I watched with equal parts of joy and sadness the longest day of the year come and go.

  TO NAME IS TO POSSESS

  The way you think and feel about gardens and the things growing in them—flowers, vegetables—I can see must depend on where you come from, and I don’t mean the difference in opinion and feeling between a person from Spain and a person from England but a difference like this:

  The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf … The great still oaks and beeches flung down a shade as dense as that of velvet curtains; and the place was furnished, like a room, with cushioned seats, with rich-coloured rugs, with the books and papers that lay upon the grass.

  And this:

  The smooth, stoneless drive ran between squat, robust conifers on one side and a blaze of canna lilies burning scarlet and amber on the other. Plants like that belonged to the cities. They had belonged to the pages of my language reader, to the yards of Ben and Betty’s uncle in town. Now, having seen it for myself because of my Babamukuru’s kindness, I too could think of planting things for merrier reasons than the chore of keeping breath in the body. I wrote it down in my head: I would ask Maiguru for some bulbs and plant a bed of those gay lilies on the homestead. In front of the house. Our home would answer well to being cheered up by such lovely flowers. Bright and cheery, they had been planted for joy. What a strange idea that was. It was a liberation, the first of many that followed from my transition to the mission.

  The first quotation is from Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, and it can be found isolated in a book called Pleasures of the Garden: Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Mac Griswold, beneath a painting by Pierre Bonnard called The Terrace at Vernon. The painting is rich, rich, rich: rich in color (a profusion of reds, oranges, yellows, blues, greens), rich in material things, rich in bounty from the land. And the quotation itself, with its “little feast,” its luxurious observations “splendid summer afternoon” and “flood of summer light,” could have been written only by a person who comes from a place where the wealth of the world is like a skin, a natural part of the body, a right, assumed, like having two hands and on them five fingers each.

  It is the second quotation that immediately means something to me, especially this: “Bright and cheery, they had been planted for joy. What a strange idea that was.” These sentences are from a novel called Nervous Conditions, by a woman from Zimbabwe named Tsitsi Dangarembga, and I suppose it is a coming-of-age novel (and really, most people who come from the far parts of the world who write books write at some point about their childhood—I believe it is a coincidence); but the book is also a description of brutality, foreign and local. There are the ingredients for a garden—a plot of land, a hoe, some seeds—but they do not lead to little feasts; they lead to nothing or they lead to work, and not work as an act of self-definition, self-acclaim, but work as torture, work as hell. And so it is quite appropriate that the young narrator—her name is Tambu—finds in the sight of things growing just for the sheer joy of it, liberation.

  And what is the relationship between gardening and conquest? Is the conqueror a gardener and the conquered the person who works in the field? The climate of southern Africa is not one that has only recently become hospitable to flowering herbs, and so it is quite possible (most likely) that the ancestors of this girl Tambu would have noticed them and cultivated them, not only for their medicinal value, but also for the sheer joy of seeing them all by themselves in their loveliness, in afternoons that were waning, in light that had begun to ebb. At what moment was this idea lost? At what moment does such ordinary, everyday beauty become a luxury?

  When the Spanish marauder Hernando Cortez and his army invaded Mexico, they met “floating gardens … teeming with flowers and vegetables, and moving like rafts over the waters”; as they looked down on the valley of Mexico, seeing it for the first time, a “picturesque assemblage of water, woodland, and cultivated plains, its shining cities and shadowy hills, was spread out like some gay and gorgeous panorama before them,” and “stretching far away at their feet were seen noble forests of oak, sycamore, and cedar, and beyond, yellow fields of maize and the towering maguey, intermingled with orchards and blooming gardens”; there were “flowers, which, with their variegated and gaudy colors, form the greatest attraction of our greenhouses”; and again: “Extensive gardens were spread … filled with fragrant shrubs and flowers, and especially with medicinal plants. No country has afforded more numerous species of these last … and their virtues were perfectly understood by the Aztecs, with whom medical botany may be said to have been studied as a science.” (All this is from The Conquest of Mexico, by William H. Prescott, and it is the best history of conquest I have ever read.) Quite likely, within a generation most of the inhabitants of this place (Mexico), spiritually devastated, would have lost touch with that strange idea—things planted for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.