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.
The opening lines quickly and effectively establish the connection between the author and the subject. This is significant because it establishes an important contextual understanding to the volume. Later, the author will make a confession that she is not one of those people often described as “at one with nature.” Not that she is an indoor recluse or anything, but she is quick to shy away from some of the less pleasant aspects of the natural world. In other words, she is not a born gardener; she did not come into the world blessed with a green thumb. Gardening, the book will reveal, is a pleasure for her, but not one without its equal share of frustration and disappointment.
This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of) really only reflects the fact that when I livered there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so.
The author’s birth name is Elaine Potter Richardson. The “place” Kincaid is from is indicated by her pen name: Jamaica is a regional neighbor about two or three hours away by plane from Antigua, the author’s homeland. Without getting too deep into the weeds on the history being discussed here, suffice to say that the botanical garden located near her home in Antigua was very light on native plants, but featured more than just a few plants native to those geographic locations sharing not only the same climate, but also the same colonial conditions featuring a girl named Elizabeth on their currency. This background information is provided not simply for the purpose for explaining why the author came to gardening later in life; it is just one part of the tapestry of history, art, regional idiosyncrasies, architecture and geography that broaden the meaning and lend context to the subject at hand.
It isn’t easy to grow hard fruits in the garden in my climate and no one told me so; not the catalogue, which succeeded in convincing me that that their nursery was situated in a climate even more severe than my own, not my fellow gardeners, who were always serving me a delicious apple pie from their exceptionally productive little orchard…
Frustration is a way of life for those who become obsessed with gardening. It goes with the territory. So do the other elements of the gardening life that is touched upon here. Kincaid makes it clear that that one probably can learn how to garden simply from reading books, but probably shouldn’t. This excerpt is from a chapter titled “An Order to a Fruit Nursery Through the Mail.” The entire chapter is barely two pages long and half of that is comprised entirely of the list of items and prices that she ordered through the catalogue. The bulk of the rest of the chapter details how the result of her attempt to grow pears turned out to be a complete disaster, followed by the excerpt quoted above which is actually just one half of the entire paragraph. All of which leads to the revelatory kicker at the end in which Kincaid notes that this order and subsequent disastrous pear-growing experiment took place six years earlier after which she vowed never to make the same mistake again, just before the chapter ends with her confession that she is making up an order at that particular moment in time, ready to try again. The chapter concludes with a plea: “Oh, please, someone, Help Me!”
I have really learned this as a gardener: listen to everyone and then grow the things you love. I have learned as much through my own conceitedness and from my own mistakes as I have from all the great gardeners I have met.
Ultimately, this is the central message that the book conveys. Not that one should grow the things they love or that one should listen to everyone, but that it is only after working your way through your own flaws and failures and ignorance that you finally reach the point where you sort of halfway know what you are doing. Kincaid never forwards the position that one can perfect the art of gardening nor that it is a thing which for some would be impossible to learn. Like everything else she writes about, gardening is about learning and learning about anything is always in part going to be a process of learning about yourself.
