My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  That very same garden that he (Monet) made does not exist; that garden died, too, the way gardens do when their creators and sustainers disappear. And yet the garden at Giverny that he (Monet) made is alive in the paintings, and the person seeing the paintings (and that would be anyone, really) can’t help but wonder where they came from, what the things in the painting were really like in their vegetable and animal (physical) form. In the narrative that we are in (the Western one), the word comes before the picture; the word makes us long for a picture, the word is never enough for the thing just seen—the picture!

  The garden that Monet made has been restored to itself, has been restored so that when we now look at it, there is no discrepancy, it is just the way we remember it (but this must be the paintings), it is just the way it should be. As I was standing there in June (nearby were tray upon tray of ageratum seedlings about to be planted out in a bedding), a man holding a camera (and he was the very definition of confidence) said to me, “Monet knew exactly what he was doing.” I did not say to him that people who know exactly what they are doing always end up with exactly what they are doing.

  The house at Giverny in which he (Monet) lived has also been restored. It can be seen, a tour of the house and garden is available. As I was going through the rooms of the house—the yellow dining room, the blue kitchen, the bedrooms with the beds all properly made up, the drawing room with prints of scenes and people from Japan—I hurried, I rushed through. I felt as if at any moment now, the occupant, the owner (Monet, whoever it might be) would return and I would be caught looking into someone’s private life. I would be caught in a place I was not really meant to be.

  WHAT JOSEPH BANKS WROUGHT

  Whatever it is in the character of the English people that leads them to obsessively order and shape their landscape and to such a degree that it, the English landscape, looks like a painting (tamed, framed, captured, kind, decent, good, pretty)—and a painting never looks like it, the English landscape, unless it is a bad painting—this quality of character that leads to obsessive order and shape in the landscape is blissfully lacking in the Antiguan people. I make this unfair comparison (unfair to the Antiguan people? unfair to the English people? I cannot tell, but there is an unfairness here somewhere) only because so much of the character of the Antiguan people is influenced by and directly inherited (through conquest) from the English people; I can cite immediately the pity and cruelty showered at once on the weak, and a love of gossip (which I think is one reason the English people have produced such great novelists, but this has not yet worked to the advantage of the Antiguan people).

  When the English were a presence in Antigua, the places they lived in were surrounded by severely trimmed hedges of plumbago, topiaries of willow (casuarina), frangipani, hibiscus; their grass was green (strange, because water was scarce) and freshly cut; there were arches covered with roses, and there were beds of marigolds and cannas and chrysanthemums. Ordinary Antiguans then (and by “ordinary Antiguans” I mean the Antiguan people who are descended from the African slaves brought to this island by Europeans; this turns out to be not an uncommon way to become ordinary), the ones who had some money and so could live in a house with more than one room, had gardens in which only flowers were grown, and this would make even more clear that they had some money, because all their outside space was not devoted only to feeding their families but also to the sheer beauty of things. I can remember in particular one such family who lived in a house with many rooms (four to be exact) and they had a lawn always neatly cut and they had beds of flowers, though I can now remember only roses and marigolds, and I can remember this because once I was sent to get a bouquet of roses for my godmother on her birthday; and this family also had in the middle of their small lawn a casuarina tree pruned so that it took the shape of a pine tree (pyramidal), and at Christmas time this tree was decorated with colored light–bulbs (which was so unusual and luxurious to me that when I passed by this house at that time I would beg to be allowed to stop and stare at it for a while). At Christmas time the willow tree would suddenly be called a Christmas tree, and for a time when my family must have had some money (it would have been only a small amount) I had a Christmas tree, a lonely spindly branch of a willow tree sitting in a bucket of water in our very small house, though no one in my family, and I am almost certain no one in the family of the people with the lighted-up willow tree, had any idea of the origins of the tradition of the Christmas tree and the things associated with it.

  When these people (the Antiguans) lived under the influence of those other people (the English) there was naturally an attempt among certain of them to imitate their rulers in this particular way, arranging a landscape, and they did this without question; they can’t be faulted for not asking what it was they were doing, that is the way these things work. The English left, and their landscaping influence went with them. The Americans came, but Americans are not interested in influencing people directly; Americans instinctively understand the childlike principle of monkey see, monkey do, and at the same time they are more divided, more complicated than the English. Americans behave like this: half of them believe in and support strongly a bad thing their government is doing; the other half do not believe in and protest strongly a bad thing their government is doing. The bad thing succeeds and everyone, protester and supporter alike, immensely enjoys the results of the bad thing. This division in the many is startling in the individual. Thomas Jefferson, the third American President and a great gardener in his time, owned slaves and strongly supported the idea of an expanded American Territory, which meant the demise of the people who owned and lived on this land. At the same time, he passionately advocated ideas about freedom, ideas that the descendants of the slaves and the people who were defeated and robbed could use in defense of themselves (the guns they would have were not powerful enough). He was an advocate of the great trek his former secretary, the land adventurer and botany thief Meriwether Lewis, made through the West. The Lewisia, the state flower of Montana, is named after him; Clarkia, not a flower of any state as far as I know, is named for his co-adventurer and botany thief, William Clark.

  What did the botanical life of Antigua consist of at the time another famous adventurer (Christopher Columbus) first saw it? To see a garden in Antigua now will not supply a clue. The bougainvillea (named for another restless European, the sea adventurer Louis de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to cross the Pacific) is native to tropical South America; the plumbago is from southern Africa; the croton is from Malaysia; the hibiscus is from Asia (unfringed petal) and East Africa (fringed petal); the allamanda is from Brazil; the poinsettia (named for an American ambassador, Joseph Poinsett) is from Mexico; the bird of paradise is from southern Africa; the Bermuda lily is from Japan; the flamboyant tree is from Madagascar; the casuarina comes from Australia; the Norfolk pine comes from Norfolk Island in the South Pacific; the tamarind tree is from Africa and Asia. The mango is from Asia. The breadfruit is from the East Indies. This food, the breadfruit, has been the cause of more disagreement between parents and their children than anything I can think of. No West Indian that I know has ever liked it. It was sent to the West Indies by Joseph Banks, the English naturalist and world traveler, and the founder of Kew Gardens, which was then a clearinghouse for all the plants stolen from the various parts of the world these people had been (the climbing rose R. banksiae from China was named for his wife). He sent tea to India, he sent the West Indies the breadfruit; it was meant to be a cheap food for feeding slaves. It was in the cargo that Captain Bligh was carrying to the West Indies on the Bounty when his crew so correctly mutinied. (Perhaps Antiguan children sense intuitively the part this food has played in the history of injustice and so they will not eat it.) It grows readily, it bears fruit abundantly, it is impervious to drought, a serious impediment to the growing of things anywhere. In a place like Antigua the breadfruit is not a food, it is a weapon.

  What herb of any beauty grew in this place? What tree? And di
d the people who lived there grow them for their own sake? I do not know, I can find no record of it. I can only make a guess in this way: the frangipani, the mahogany tree, the cedar tree are all native to the West Indies, and Antigua is in the West Indies. The botany of Antigua exists in medicinal folklore. My mother and I were sitting on the steps in front of her house one day and I suddenly saw a beautiful (to me now; when I was a child I thought it ugly) bush whose fruit I remembered playing with when I was a child; it is a herbacious plant with a red stem covered with red thorns, and emerald-green simple leaves with the same red thorns running down the leaf from the leaf stalk. I cannot remember what its flowers looked like—it was not in flower when I saw it while I was sitting with my mother—but its fruit is a small, almost transparent red berry, and it is with this I used to play. We children sometimes called it chinaberry; because of its transparent, glassy look, it reminded us of china dinnerware (we were only vaguely familiar with such a thing as china, having seen it perhaps once or twice) and sometimes baby tomato—because of its size and to show that it was not real, a baby anything was not a real thing. When I pointed it out to my mother, she called it something else; she called it cancanberry bush and said that years ago when people could not afford to see doctors, if their child had thrush, they would make a paste with this fruit and rub it inside the child’s mouth, and this would make it go away. But, she said, no one bothers with any of this anymore. The day before that, a friend of hers had come to pay her a visit, and when my mother offered her friend something to eat and drink, her friend declined because, she said, she had some six sixty-six and maiden-blush tea waiting at home for her. This tea is taken on an empty stomach, and it is used for all sorts of ailments, including abortions. I have never seen six sixty-six in flower, but its leaves are a beautiful ovoid shape and a deep green, qualities that are of value in a garden devoted to the shape and color of leaves.

  Whenever I say to someone that there is a relationship between gardening and prosperity, they are apt to throw in my face the image of that oppressed, sad, pinched-face person, the English cottage gardener. Apart from the fact that the person who usually says this to me is usually someone who does not know a cottage gardener personally and would never be a friend of one, the fact is that a cottage gardener is not a gardener any more than my mother is a gardener. My mother is someone who puts a few things here and there for her own use; the beauty or not-beauty of it, she decides. And if the cottage gardener does not exist in a place like Antigua, it is because people from places like Antigua are not called things like that; casual botanical conversation, the Latin names for plants, a discussion of the binomial system—where I am from, I am not aware that an atmosphere for these things exists in this place. I can remember well the cruel English person who was my botany teacher and that, in spite of her cruelty, botany and history were my favorite subjects in school. With this in mind, I visited a bookstore (the only bookstore in Antigua) to see what texts were now being used in the schools and to see how they compared with what was taught to me then; the botany I had studied was the botany of the British Empire in Africa and Asia, some of the very same plants that are now widely cultivated in Antigua and must seem to most Antiguans (if they ever think about it) as typical of their native landscape. But botany as a subject is no longer taught in Antiguan schools; the study of plants is now called Agriculture. Perhaps this is a more realistic view, because the awe and poetry of botany cannot be eaten, the mystery and beauty in the knowledge of botany cannot be taken to market.

  And yet the people on Antigua have a relationship to agriculture that cannot please them at all. Their very presence on this island hundreds of years ago has to do with this thing, agriculture. When they (we) were brought to this island from Africa a few hundred years ago, it was not for their pottery-making skills or for their way with a loom; it was for the free labor they could provide in the fields. In an account of her life, Mary Prince, an enslaved African woman who spent some time as a slave in Antigua, wrote:

  My master and mistress went on one occasion into the country, to Date Hill, for change of air, and carried me with them to take charge of the children, and to do the work of the house. While I was in the country, I saw how the field negroes are worked in Antigua. They are worked very hard and fed but scantily. They are called out to work before daybreak, and come home after dark; and then each has to heave his bundle of grass for the cattle pen. Then on Sunday morning, each slave has to go out and gather a large bundle of grass; and, when they bring it home, they have all to sit at the manager’s door and wait till he come out: often they have to wait there till past eleven o’clock, without any breakfast. After that, those that have yams or potatoes, or fire-wood to sell, hasten to market to buy salt fish or pork, which is a great treat for them.

  It seems so clear to me, then, that a group of people who have had such a horrible historical association with growing things would try to make any relationship to it dignified (agriculture) and useful.

  In a book I am looking at (even to read it is to look at it, the type is as big as a doll’s teacup), called The Tropical Garden, I find sentences like: “The concept of a private garden planted purely for aesthetic purposes was generally alien to tropical countries” and “There was no tradition of ornamental horticulture among the inhabitants of most hot weather places. Around the average home there might be a few specimens chosen especially because of their scented flowers or because they were believed to bring good fortune … Nor would much, if any, attention be paid to attractive landscape design in such gardens: early accounts by travelers in the tropics abound in enthusiastic descriptions of jungle scenery, but a reader will search in vain for one praising the tasteful arrangement of massed ornamental beds and contrasting lawns of well-trimmed grass around the homes of natives.” And what can I say to that? No doubt it is true. And no doubt also, contrasting lawns and massed ornamental beds are signs of something, and I want to say what that something is: someone has been humbled, someone is on his knees wondering what happened, someone will have an eternal love of concrete. Just to show what I mean: on page 62 of this book is a photograph of eight men, natives of India, pulling a heavy piece of machinery used in the upkeep of lawns. They are without shoes. They are wearing the clothing of schoolboys, khaki shorts and khaki short-sleeved shirts. A look of bliss is not on their faces. The caption for this photograph reads: “Shortage of labour was never a problem in the maintenance of European features in large colonial gardens; here a team of workers is shown rolling a lawn at the Gymkhana Club in Bombay.”

  And here is another question the author, Mr. Warren, might have asked himself: What if the people living in the tropics, the ones whose history isn’t tied up with and contaminated by slavery and indenturedness, are content with their surroundings, are happy to observe an invisible hand at work and from time to time laugh at some of the ugly choices this hand makes, have more important things to do than making a small tree large, a large tree small, a tree whose blooms are usually yellow, black; what if these people are not spiritually feverish, restless, and full of envy? I don’t have an answer to these questions myself; if I did I would tell.

  There must be many ways to have someone be the way you would like them to be; I only know of two with any certainty: You can hold a gun to their head or you can clearly set out before them the thing you would like them to be, and eventually they admire it so much, without even knowing they do so, that they adopt your ways, almost to the point of sickness; they come to believe that your way is their way and would die before they give it up. When I was looking at the book of tropical gardens, the flowers and the trees so familiar to me from my childhood, so native to a background like mine, were without any hold at all on me. I do not really like the bougainvillea, I do not really like the hibiscus. The corallita (from Mexico), so beautiful when tended, so ugly when left to itself, making everything it comes near look rusty and shabby, is not a plant I like at all. I returned from a visit to Antigua, the place where I
was born, to a small village in Vermont, the place where I choose to live. It was spring then. The tulips I had planted last autumn were in bloom and I liked sitting caressing their petals, which felt like skin made up of peau de soie, deliciously disgusting. The dizzy-making yellow of dandelions and marsh marigolds were in fields and riverbanks and marshes. I like these things. I do not like daffodils, but that’s a legacy of the gun-to-the-head approach, for I was forced to memorize the poem by William Wordsworth when I was a child. I transplanted my foxgloves to a place in the middle of a grove of pine trees. I waited for the things I had ordered in the deep cold of winter to come. They started to come. Mr. Pembroke, who represents our village in the Vermont legislature, came and helped me dig some of the holes where some of the things I wanted were to be planted. Mr. Pembroke is a very nice man, there is not a look of misery on his face, on his face is a look of ordinary human something, but exactly what I do not know. We agree on a price, he sends me a bill. The days are growing longer and longer, and then they’ll get shorter again. I am now used to that, I love that. There is no order in my garden. I live in America now. Americans are too impatient with memory, one of the things order thrives on.

  THE GLASSHOUSE

  The botanical garden that I knew as a child did not need a glass enclosure. The atmosphere in which it was situated, a hot, humid climate, provided that. To us, it was an unusual idea: a garden in which were gathered specimens of plants from various parts of the British Empire; but we soon absorbed it, got used to it, took it for granted, the way we had with another European idea, that of leaving your own native (European) climate and living in places native to other people whom you cannot stand. Again, it was an unusual idea and we associated it with our dominators, the English people, their love, their need to isolate, name, objectify, possess various parts, people, and things in the world.