My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  This business with the too many roses began two summers ago, when I received a letter from Jackson & Perkins inviting me to become one of the people in the United States to choose the best of the new roses they were introducing that year. In a brochure that came with the invitation, some people testified to the pleasure they had had while participating in this venture, and they were so effusive that at first I thought they must have got the roses free; they had not. For a reason not at all clear to me, I am drawn to the activities of people I do not want to know or meet and would never befriend, and so, of course, the minute I saw this brochure I sent my money away so that I, too, could become a member of the Rose Test Panel. The competitors arrived at the same time as all the other species, but they didn’t have proper names; they were labeled ‘Pink Blend,’ ‘Pink,’ ‘White,’ and ‘Yellow.’ I planted them, and at first I observed them closely, for I expected to receive a bothersome diary and, when that didn’t happen, a phone call and, when that didn’t happen, some form of communication from Jackson & Perkins soliciting my observations about these roses. I forgot about the Test Panel; other problems became overwhelming: the canes of the ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ (which I got from Wayside) grew tall and then fell over onto the lawn, and it would not bloom; I had read Peter Beale, who said of it: “This rose at its best is the most beautiful of all Bourbons, but at its worst it can be horrid. It hates wet weather and in such conditions seldom opens properly without help.” I had been staring for a long time at the multitude of flopped-over canes when it dawned on me that what I was looking at was not a ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ at all but something else altogether, something that had perhaps been misnamed. Not so very long after that, I received another letter from Jackson & Perkins inviting me to join next year’s Rose Test Panel. Actually, through a lack of communication between Jackson & Perkins and me, I had never voted on the four roses I had grown, and this left me with little enthusiasm for judging the Jackson & Perkins roses of the future.

  The rose with which I had the most success was the ‘Yellow,’ though it isn’t one I would tell people they must have. A rose I would recommend is ‘Ballerina’; all summer I watched it send out sprays of dappled-pink blossoms on long apple-green canes. I had planted it next to some clethra, and for a while they were in bloom together, so I actually got a small glimpse of a something I had planned.

  Just as I was mulching and covering up the roses for winter, I came upon Christopher Lloyd saying in the increasingly beautiful-to-look-at Gardens Illustrated: “I got fed up with all the trouble roses bring in their train. They get a lot of diseases and you can’t replace a weak bush without changing the soil. They’re quite disagreeable and make a very spotty effect even when they’re flowering—a whole series of blobs. The climbing ones are quite shapely but the bush roses are pretty ugly.” It’s so appealing, the capriciousness of a gardener! I see that I shall be overwhelmed by the number of roses I will have ordered by next spring, so that twenty years hence I will firmly denounce the whole idea of growing roses.

  I returned from a visit to the old suitcase (England) in May and found my hedge of common rhubarb in an incredible state of bloom, the tall stems covered with panicles of white; I stared at it in awe, as if I had never seen anything so beautiful, but I had. It then faded, of course, but not quite away; it turned brown—a deep, crisp, alive shade, a tropical not a temperate brown—almost as if in defiance, for everything else was in a state of fresh, young green. I cut it down to the ground, and it grew back, so that by the tail end of summer, I was able to eat some rhubarb again, but this seemed all wrong, all out of context: when the days are getting longer is the right time to eat rhubarb.

  In early June, perhaps giddy from observing the rhubarb and planting various things, I went to the store to buy milk, and on my way out bought three packets of nasturtium seeds. I had wanted to plant something along a walkway that leads to the door on the south side of our house—something that would spill over the slabs of marble in a happy, haphazard way—and the moment I saw the seed packets I knew the nasturtiums would do. They turned out to be one of the great pleasures of my growing season. I planted them very close together and I did not thin them but instead pruned and trained them to grow only in one direction: out onto the walk. They must have loved where they were, for they thrived. At night, the smell from them—sweet, like something fermenting that when consumed would make you crazy—was delicious. I considered my walkway a great triumph and was on the verge of bragging about it, but then, looking through Wayne Winterrowd’s most helpful book of annuals (Annuals for Connoiseurs), I saw a photograph of nasturtiums spilling out onto a walkway in Monet’s garden. At first I felt wonderful that I had had the same idea as a great gardener, and then, unable to help myself, I felt envy, because his nasturtiums had turned out much better than mine. His looked like a painting—the way all natural beauty looks. Mine were just a planting of nasturtiums.

  A prostrate-growing evening primrose (Oenothera missouriensis) that I found at the Equinox Valley Nursery in Manchester, Vermont, was spectacular. I had never grown this particular primrose before and so had never seen the cycle of its amazing bloom: it has thick red stems from which sprout fat green pods (buds), sometimes with large red spots on them, and each pod breaks open at dusk to reveal a huge bubble of perfectly simple yellow, which by the middle of the next day has become a limp, slimy thing, like a squished caterpillar. (I made my son, Harold, hold one, and when he did he said, “Oh yuck!”) Also at Equinox, I found a pink evening primrose (Oenothera ‘Rosea’). It is about ten inches high, with small narrow leaves that turn beautifully red in fall; it spreads rapidly and is already all over the bed, but this will be just fine, because it is at the foot of the hollyhocks and musk mallow and sidalceas. That corner of the garden—hollyhocks, musk mallow, and sidalceas, with the roses ‘Cécile Brünner’ (both climbing and shrub) at one end and R. ‘Ballerina’ at the other—was meant to be a mass of varying shades of pink, but the sidalceas turned out to be a horrid shade of lilac, not at all the pink that I had seen in the catalogue. I deserved this: I got them from a puffed-up plantsman’s outfit in Connecticut, where the people are very rude and high-handed on the phone. Of course, they would not take the sidalceas back. They were also quite skeptical when I said that a Canada lily they had sent was another kind of lily altogether. They replaced it in the fall with what they said were bulbs, but I have never seen bulbs like that, and if these odd-looking things fail to turn into plants, I can’t imagine calling the company back to tell them so. This is a big contrast to my rapport with the people at Wayside, who are always eager to help, and make amends for every fault that’s found; they even send letters of apology. (It’s possible that this is an example of the way climate influences modes of behavior; does warm air inspire servitude? Wayside is in North Carolina.)

  Another disappointment: one day a shipment of three-and-a-half-foot twigs arrived, apparently the hundreds of dollars’ worth of fruit trees that I had ordered from a fruit-tree grower in upstate New York. They seemed such a far cry from the overladen-with-fruit trees I had seen in the catalogue that I almost burst into tears. I planted them on what was, for May, a severely cold and windy day; and a huge emptiness opened up before me: I thought, Between this planting and the reaping (I hope) to come, I will fill the time up, but with what? I did not know the answer, and this inspired such a state of anxiety that I had to lie down.

  It was on another day altogether that I ended up in a similar state of anxiety for a very different reason. I was taking an indirect route going to the grocery store and I came upon a field of joe-pye weed in bloom. I had recently started bringing mullein into my garden, and when I felt I had enough of those, I started raiding my own field for joe pyes and bonesets. I love these flowers, and when I saw the field of joe pyes, it made me feel so happy and giddy, because it was so unexpected (I had no idea any were growing there). Then, when I got to the store, I heard the woman who waited on customers say to the man ahead
of me, “Hi, honey. God, you’re beautiful today,” and this struck me as untrue, because I had seen the man quite clearly. After he left I said to her, “What made you say that to that man? He was one of the ugliest men I have ever seen,” and she replied, “That was my husband.” Retracing my route on the way home, I was so blind with humiliation and anxiety and shame that I did not even see the joe pyes.

  I was eating a plate of common Blue Lake green beans in August, and they were extremely delicious; I had never grown them before, and I realized that I almost never grow ordinary vegetables. I have become so confident of having a constant supply of food that often when I decide to grow things I can eat they have to transcend the ordinary: they must have a different color from the usual; they must have a different shape; they must come from far away; they must be the favorite food of the people in the countryside of France or Italy, or in the mountains of Peru. It was this perversity that led me to grow French Marmande tomatoes, as well as some other tomatoes, which looked like large gooseberries (called ‘Green Zebra,’ and they were the best tomatoes I have ever tasted), and various odd potatoes—one called ‘Russian Banana,’ other kinds that looked like fingers, or were blue-skinned, or were pink when mashed. I also grew some cucumbers that were juicy and sweet and are ordinarily grown in Turkey or Syria (or somewhere near those places), and some purple beans that turned a disappointing green when cooked.

  In early September I picked and cut open a small, soft, yellow-fleshed watermelon, and I was suddenly reminded of the pictures of small girls I used to see in a magazine for girls when I was a small girl myself: they were always at a birthday party, and the colors of their hair and of the clothes they wore and of the light in the room were all some variation of this shade, the golden shade of the watermelon that I had grown. I would wish then to be a girl like that, with hair like that, in a room like that—and the despair I felt then that such a thing would never be true is replaced now with the satisfaction that such a thing would never be true. Those were the most delicious melons I have ever grown.

  The leaves turned yellow and red and brown, and then fell; the days grew short; the heat from the sun grew thin, then just wasn’t there anymore at all. I planted six different kinds of fritillaria, and some flag iris, and some peonies—ordinary ones, not trees, that looked spectacular in the catalogue I ordered them from. Then one day the long chill arrived, the chill that no heat can penetrate. Winter.

  READING

  It was a day in late October and I had two thousand dollars’ worth of heirloom bulbs to place in the ground (the daffodils ‘Empress of Ireland,’ ‘Beersheeba,’ ‘Beryl,’ Telmonius plenus, ‘Queen of the North’; the tulips ‘Mrs. John T. Scheepers,’ ‘Queen of Night,’Tulipa clusiana, T turkestanica; Iris bucharica), when almost one foot of snow fell on the ground. I do not like winter or anything that represents it (snow, the bare branches of trees, the earth seeming to hold its breath), and so I disliked the ground being covered with this soft substance (sticky and at the same time not so), with a color so definite (white) as if it wished to dispel any doubt that might arise in regard to this particular quality (its color, white). But snow will occupy all the spaces you know, the space above the ground, the space below the ground, and if you try to turn inward, as long as it is in front of you, it will occupy that space, too. For me, to look at a landscape covered with this substance is to look at despair, and I cannot find anything in the history of human beings to make me feel that my view is merely personal (I grew up on an island in a climate that is tropical and therefore am prejudiced). All I see when I look at the history of human beings is that people who find themselves living with this substance, snow, and the stilled landscape that comes with it, go South or long for the warmth that comes from living in the Southern Hemisphere. I feel that I can state this with some certainty only after helping my son make a map of the travels of Eric the Red and Lucky Leif Eriksson. This is the evidence I have for my feelings, but my own history contradicts this: I come from south (far south, I come from the West Indies) of where I now live, and I love the event called spring and accept that it comes after winter and that it cannot come without winter.

  The snow so early did not go away; the snow stayed and the air grew colder and so winter started in mid-autumn. I began to complain and make a big fuss about this, but when I took a look at a pathetic journal of climate that I keep and make entries in from time to time, I saw that each year I say the same thing; winter always starts at about the same time (mid-autumn) and I always feel that this is unusual, that it comes too soon. The ground became harder and harder and harder still; the Cyclamen hederifolium (planted in the shade of an old hemlock) looked diminished, old; how could I have imagined that such a thing as cyclamens could ever really grow properly in my climate; except that I know they will come back along with the Arum italicum, which looks sort of similar, the leaves dappled with white and generous in shape in the way of leaves that belong in the tropics.

  The surprise, the shock, of winter has become to me like a kiss from someone I love: I expect it, I want it, and yet, Ah! For it holds the expectation of pleasure to come: spring, yes, but most immediately the arrival of catalogues with their descriptions and illustrations of the familiar (achillea, campanula) desperately attempting to and actually succeeding in sounding like something new, something you must order right away even as it lies outside in your garden, dormant. You can imagine its roots tight and stilled beneath the ground, if you just look out your window; it is building up the resources to emerge with a vigor (in the seemingly fabled spring) so frightening you secretly consult your memory on the one-through-four steps of dividing plant material.

  I walked around my garden with such thoughts on my mind. Some of them I think are recurring, some of them new, but the new eventually recur if I garden long enough, for the garden repeats itself all the time and will advance only so long as human history and all that it entails moves along also. The earth was folded shut and I was at first shocked, but then remembered it from before; the sun was weak, not stinking with heat, not threatening a fire of extinction, erasure, but I remembered that, too, from before. By now I have been gardening for years, and memory, ephemeral, subject to things I hope not to understand, is for me an anchor. Walking around the garden, then, I am full of thoughts of doom, I am full of thoughts of life beyond my own imagining. I come inside.

  On this particular day the mail was mostly from my creditors (garden related), first gently pleading that I pay them and then in the next paragraph proffering a threat of some kind. But since there was no clear Dickensian reference (debtors’ prison), I wasn’t at all disturbed, and when I saw that along with the bills there were some catalogues, all caution and sense of financial responsibility went away. The best catalogues of any kind, whether they are offering fruits, vegetables, flowers, shrubs, trees, will not have any pictures; the best nurserymen in this country will not sully their catalogues with lavish pictures but will only now and then print some little illustration of a leaf, a bird perched on a limb of something, a pail (empty or full, it won’t matter), a watering can; the best nurserymen will sometimes not give you any information on growing zones or instructions regarding cultivation; the best nurserymen just assume that if you are interested in what they have to offer (all of it so unusual, it is sometimes not to be found yet in any plant encyclopedia) they will be chatty enough about it; they will be full of anecdotes in regard to the season just past, but they will not show you a picture and you certainly will not have a little passport-size photograph of them grinning up at you.

  And so it was with a certain confidence and happiness that I grabbed my catalogue from Ronniger’s, a seed and potato company in Moyie Springs, Idaho. This used to be my favorite catalogue in the world; it made people with whom I am sure I would never agree on anything of importance seem wonderful. But the current catalogue makes me hesitate. For one thing, it is almost twice as long as it used to be (forty pages then, seventy-two pages now), and the new pages are
taken up with things I would never buy from Ronniger’s anyhow: ornamental alliums, asparagus, and blueberries. It even now has a color advertisement for some soon-to-be-useless garden implement (I know this, I have the very same one in my garage, it is broken). The worst part is a picture of Mr. Ronniger crouching down next to some potatoes he has just reaped: I can see his teeth, so he must be smiling, and the picture has a caption that says “Harvest is a time of great joy.” If I am disappointed in Mr. Ronniger’s new catalogue, will I now be disappointed in the potatoes, too? For not all the potato seeds will be grown by him; the ones grown by him will be labeled “Organically Grown,” the ones grown by someone else will be labeled “Certified Seed.”

  A nice ballast to shore myself up from the emotional devastation (well, from a gardening point of view) endured during the careful reading of the potato catalogue was reading the entire six volumes of the Mapp and Lucia saga written by E. F. Benson. There is nothing I like more than reading about malice and gossip and life in a small village (I only like to read about it, though, I should not like to live in it myself). And so fortified, I returned to my favorite catalogues, the ones without pictures and captions and instructions for cultivation. In the Heronswood catalogue the plantsman Daniel J. Hinkley writes nicely about a recent seed-collecting trip he made to Japan; he writes that he saw five different species of Acer in the wild and apparently they were new to him, and also that a single specimen of Schisandra nigra loaded with fruit caused him to stop as if dead when he saw it. This catalogue and the Arrowhead Alpines catalogue is all an American gardener with intense interest would ever need. The nurseryman at Arrowhead Alpines is Bob Stewart, and he has a wife named Brigitta and a son named Ender; he has a friend who is a professor at a nearby university and that friend had an unusual clump of Petasites, certainly it was unlike any I had seen before, and he got the professor to sell some to me. One year Bob began his letter to his customers by telling us he had finally gotten rid of his first wife and the financial demands she made on him by offering her a large settlement; she accepted, but he did not say how much it was; I really did want to know.