My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  To speak of desire: is there anything I should have that I do not know about and you are about to sell the last of? Please add it to my list. I trust you both completely. What about that rose with the scarlet canes? Ooowww. Two things, requests. Dan, I am going to Holland in the middle of April, would you still like to send me to those nurserymen to see their plants and their gardens? If you are too busy to bother with it just now, pay it no mind; I will be happy anyway seeing masses of tulips. I love tulips. And what is the best time to see a garden in England, just before the end of June or just after the end of June? I am bearing in mind the symposium, and the chance to see Dan (though I will be sad not to see Robert) and feed him Edna Lewis’s corn pudding.

  Is it March where you both are? It is March here and winter is behaving like me when I am somewhere I like to be and can sense that I am making all my companions miserable by not behaving and not knowing it is time to leave. I shall go now.

  Love to you both, Jamaica

  SPRING

  At was a day in early spring, the first really spring-like day since spring arrived, and my children and I were sitting in the sun watching two seemingly very young rabbits (they were small) cavort on the grass, which was half brown, half green. They, the two rabbits, chased each other, nipping at tails, biting necks, leaping in the air together and colliding, and my children were so delighted and amazed with this sight; I sat with them with a grin on my face that was really a grimace. In fact, I was thinking, especially when I saw one rabbit chasing the other into the area that is my vegetable garden: How I wish that I could transform myself into an enormous, vividly striped animal that with a few bounds could approach the cavorting rabbits and, with a playful swat of my large paw, grab them and playfully toss them into the air. The joy I would get from hearing the snap-snap of their little necks breaking in midair would be immeasurable. When I told Annie, my daughter, this, she said, “Jeez, Mom, that is really mean.” But how mean is it really (I did not say this to her), after all I found small collections of their droppings in all the flower beds, and I am convinced that only the delightful stink of the fritillarias (the smell of the underarms of ten people you love) that I planted here, there, and everywhere, kept them away from things they would have liked to eat.

  The winter was unbearable, as usual, but this one just past seemed an exaggeration. The sky was always too low, too gray, the ground was always too high (it was the snow) and too white. The days were too short and dark, the nights were too long and darker still. Then one day, by the calendar, it was spring; not too long after that, an actual spring-like day appeared. The sun felt as if it really did give off heat, the first time in almost half a year I could say that with certainty. The grass seemed to turn green before my eyes. The last mound of snow near the edge of the field melted away fast. But winter, like a tiresome person who isn’t much liked in the first place, would not quite go away. The air still had a chill in it that I no longer had the strength to steel myself against, and so I felt more cold than I did in January. And then all at once the magic of daylight saving time did something wonderful: the day became longer and brighter even as it ended; as the remains of winter clung to the top of the hills, the line of blue and purple mist created by the trees crept up higher and higher. One day I saw an orange spot moving about the yard and I ran to the window and shouted, “The robins are here,” and the other members of my family, who were in the room also, looked at me, and though they would never speak ill of me to each other, I could see they were silently wondering if I was crazy.

  And on that day when it was really spring, it was all about us, everything that was still alive was in bud, and the sun was warm, we were sitting in it and had to take off our jackets, it was possible to see some of what had survived the winter. All my roses were alive. I was especially pleased to see the roses ‘Ballerina’ and ‘Cécile Brünner,’ which many people had told me I could not grow in this climate, covered with the small red pimples of new growth. 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. I have learned that though I live in zone 5, parts of my garden have a microclimate of their own that places them in zone 6.

  One day the air was glistening, shimmering, with tints of red, green, yellow, blue from the budding trees. The sun had climbed up, making its long way across the sky. It was warm, it was May. Snakes in pairs emerged from the stone wall and from in between the stone steps, and sat all coiled up in that perfect way so typical of them, inspiring fear and admiration. I am afraid of snakes and so have the impulse to kill them all immediately, but then I remember their predatory nature; I saw one of them slithering across the lawn to the place where I believe a family of shrews live (I am even more afraid of rodents than I am of snakes). The month of May comes on suddenly and moves along swiftly, and each day pleasure after pleasure is flung before my eyes with such intensity that after the barrenness and harshness, in varying degrees, of the months before, it seems mocking, a punishment, to look out and see the bergenia, pink and white against the bleeding heart, pink and white; the stiff pink flower of the umbrella plant (Peltiphyllum peltatum, a plant introduced to me by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd), followed by large leaves held up by long, elegant stems; the pink and blue, white and mauve of the pulmonarias (‘Mrs. Moon,’ ‘Janet Fisk,’ ‘Sissinghurst White’); the emerging green tips of the hosta, missile-like in shape, slow in progress as the snails who so like to nibble at their tender shoots; the flowering apple trees. The forget-me-nots had happily spread in a part of the garden among the queen of the prairie (Filipendula rubra ‘Venusta’) and lupine and plume poppy (Macleaya), and their little blue heads among the varying shades of green were so strikingly beautiful, so simple, the pleasure in them so immediate, that it took me many minutes to mistrust it; how long would it be before some other thought would come along and undermine my delight?

  And then again, one day, another warm day, as I was standing in the children’s sandbox, which is under an extremely tall hemlock, I suddenly heard the angry screech of a bird; I recognized the sound of a mother feeling the beings she loves are in danger, and so I looked up and found the nest just above my head. I could not see what was in it, chicks or eggs, but I felt much sympathy and tried to tell her that even though I did not like her eating the sweet peas when I had just planted them and hunting down my earthworms, she was in no danger from me, she and all who looked like her were quite safe with me. That is May, the month I love the most, and when my turn comes to make the world, as surely it will, I shall make my May ninety days long. December, January, and February shall be allotted ten hours each; I have not finalized my plans for the other months, but none of them shall exceed May.

  A visit to Carlson’s Gardens (a nursery in South Salem, New York, specializing in azaleas, rhododendrons and kalmias) yielded not the stern, forbidding, opinionated Mr. Carlson I knew from the telephone but a gentle, warm man who indulged me in all my erroneous opinions about the hardiness of some plants I had been considering planting, before humorously correcting and guiding me in a most fatherly way, really, toward what would serve me best. When every once in a while I would say something that he knew to be correct, he would look at me and nod and smile and say simply, “That’s right, that’s right,” and I would just beam inside with pride, reminding myself of the small, eager, anxious child I used to be. The rhododendrons ‘Janet Blair,’ ‘Caroline Gable,’ and ‘Scintillation’ were opening up. Those would be well suited to my hardiness zone, Mr. Carlson said. In his garden they towered over me, spreading themselves out wantonly; he had planted his twenty-five years ago. The plants I could buy to bring home in the trunk of a car were not even as big as my children. If only I could know now what I will be in love with in twenty-five years; in that way I could arrange everything now so that I could have maximum enjoyment then. I bought three R. schlippenbachii.

  Lo
ng before all that, I had overwhelmed Jack Manix at Walker Farms with all the seeds I had ordered from various seed houses and sent to him to grow for me. He lives on the farm that his family has owned and worked for many generations. Much of his land is now not farmed at all, and the state of Vermont has cast a jealous eye on it, judging it just the right place to put a dump. It is the fault of all the other people who have moved to Vermont with their families, people like me, who wouldn’t harm anyone directly. Jack Manix never complained to me about his embattled condition, he only marveled at the amount of seeds I had sent him. I had ordered fifteen different kinds of foxgloves from Thompson & Morgan, five different kinds of primroses, daturas, meconopsis (Jack said he wasn’t sure he could make this germinate at all), seeds of poppies from Pine Tree Gardens in Maine, and the only place where I also found seeds for Artemisia annua (Sweet Annie). I had ordered about five different kinds of daturas, meaning to share them with a friend, but after she read a hysterical account by Allen Lacy (in Home Ground) of the dangers this plant poses to children and the danger it had posed to early settlers of America, she refused to take any of them. (Even though I pointed out to her that where I come from the datura is an obnoxious weed inhabiting and colonizing every vacant spot of ground where nothing else will grow and that I have never heard of children or anyone else dying from it, but I have heard of children and others dying of malnutrition, she would not change her mind.)

  There was rain and it came down in that unwelcome way of something necessary but just not needed at that moment, which led to complaints and all other kinds of fretting, because perhaps some things would rot and other things not germinate at all. None of those fears were realized, but there were an overwhelming number of blue-and-gray fat-bodied bugs sucking nectar from the buds of the lupines and the rosebuds, and one morning before the sun came up, after the children had boarded a bus to school, I killed them all by myself with doses of insecticidal soap. On one of those rainy days when I could not work outside, I had peered into a dark corner of the garden, made even darker by the weather itself, and I thought of blue-leaf hostas, and so called up Mr. Ruh at Sunnybrook Farms in Wisconsin, a nursery specializing in hostas. In particular, he and Mrs. Ruh list in their catalogue this: “The Tardiana of Eric Smith” and with the simple question of What is the Tardiana of Eric Smith? I stepped into a sort of family controversy. Mr. Ruh told me that Eric Smith was a gardener and hosta hybridizer who eventually bred some of the bluest of the blue-leaf hostas. He, Eric Smith, was the gardener (that is, the working hand) to a famous gardener (that is, the person who owned the garden), but instead of doing his work (gardening) he kept breeding hostas. The person for whom he worked hated hostas, and was fed up with his neglectfulness, in any case, and so fired him; Smith in a fit (of anger perhaps) threw all his experiments into the compost and went home. Shortly after that, he died, and some time after that, his experiments were found in the compost. But he left no notes on what he had done, and so only through speculating and guessing has it been possible to duplicate his work. Mr. Ruh was not at all sad to tell me the name of the gardener who fired Eric Smith. Money—i.e., not having enough of it—prevented me from ordering Eric Smith’s hostas; they cost at least fifteen dollars per plant. I have never seen his hostas, but I understand Eric Smith’s story of the fanatic, misunderstood lover against the ignorant world. In the book The Genus Hosta by W. George Schmid, under Eric Smith’s entry I read this: “H. Tardiana grex Smith UK: This group of hybrids was initially given the name the hybrid binomial H. x tardiana, but this name is illegitimate for several reasons …”; it then goes off into a gentlemanly distancing of Eric Smith from the world of real hostas. That day, a combination of moist, cold, and warm brought out the slugs, and I collected them with my own impassioned sense of grievance against them (they had eaten the delphiniums, the ligularia) in a jar; that night the children and I laid them out on the slabs of marble that make up a walk just outside my back door and sprinkled teaspoons of salt on them; they wriggled and squirmed before turning into a brown liquid. I encouraged the children’s squeals and laughter, but what I really heard were the silent screams of the slugs as they struggled into oblivion. Even as I wish never to see another slug in my garden again, I look forward to another day.

  Families are a malevolent lot, no matter the permutations they make, no matter the shape they take, no matter how beautiful they look, no matter the nice things they say.

  WHERE TO BEGIN?

  Where to begin? The rhododendron ‘Jane Grant’ arrived; on a Tuesday, while on the way to Rocky Dale Farm, a very special nursery here in Vermont, I learned that it is always closed on that particular day—Tuesday; I had ordered three dicentra ‘Snowdrift’ from two different places and they were meant for the same place, but I did not realize this until the day they arrived, which was on the same day at the same time. What to do?

  The rhododendron ‘Jane Grant’ is among the most beautiful of plants I have ever received in the mail, and that is hardly the way to judge a plant on first sight, even though that way works very well with people, but immediately, as I unwrapped her from her brown wrapping, I almost wept. She was beautiful, all delicate and tidy; glossy, medium-green leaves with a lush indumentum (R. yakushimanum is a parent), and perched on top of the leaves, a generous fist of blossoms, whitish, limy green now, eventually opening, becoming a succession of pinks (as I write this, the transformation has not yet begun), all of them reminding me of something pleasurable: a girl’s dress, the inside of a mouth, a moment very, very early in the morning when light from the sun itself is in doubt. I had resisted this shrub for so long. And why? Jane Grant, the woman it is named for, used to be married to the first editor of The New Yorker. At this very moment I can’t remember why I resisted a plant only because it is named after the wife of the first editor of The New Yorker. And this only underlines for me the flabby basis on which so many of my opinions and decisions rest, so flabby I don’t even remember them. I ordered the ‘Jane Grant’ one day in January when I was recovering from pneumonia and trying to cheer myself up by looking at pictures of flowers for sale, not pictures of flowers already growing in someone else’s garden. I saw it beautifully pictured in the White Flower Farm catalogue and ordered it (along with many other things, none of them breaking any other prohibitions, as far as I could tell), and on the day that I returned from a nursery in Quechee, Vermont (a compensation for the Rocky Dale nursery disappointment), I met my ‘Jane Grant’ and many other huge boxes filled with plants from all the nurseries I had ordered from on that day in January. There is no doubt that everyone can have an interesting garden simply by ordering through the Wayside and White Flower Farm catalogues, but to have a garden made up of unusual native (American) plants and plants from other parts of the world, particularly Japan, Korea, and China, you have to go to some smaller, less-well-known nurseries, such as Heronswood (in Washington), Arrowhead Alpines (in Michigan), Plants Delight Nursery (in North Carolina). If you find ephedra worth growing, you will not be able to purchase one from Wayside or White Flower. The Plants Delight Nursery lists four different kinds. I bought mine from Arrowhead Alpines.

  On that Tuesday when all the plants I had ordered from seeing their pictures arrived, I was not at home to receive them and immediately remove them from their cardboard prison, and provide for them a refreshment of water and a sheltered place. No. I was on my way to Rocky Dale Farm, a legendary nursery among gardeners here in Vermont. It is far away from where I live, and so I was going with a friend, who not only is unafraid to drive herself long distances (I am) but has a truck. On our way there, she had the good sense to call and see if Rocky Dale was open; they were not. Then she had the good sense to think of our going instead to Talbot’s, another nursery, just outside Quechee, Vermont. Talbot’s is a well-kept secret. Mr. Talbot is a botanist, and in the winter he gives lectures on growing plants. I had never met the Talbots before, and on the spot I made up my mind that they were so appealing—if only I lived next door. A
fter spending many hours choosing the plants I wanted to buy (flowering quince ‘Cameo,’ a fern-leaf lilac, two fern-leaf peonies, some Petasites gigantea, some ornamental rhubarb, two kinds of yellow monkshood, three different grasses, some woodland phlox, some tiarella, a katsura tree, some pussy willow with black catkins, among other things), I decided that they, the Talbots, were not unlike characters I meet in a good book and find appealing, comfortable, cozy, no matter what their faults, all their faults of course falling within reason, which is to say, not unlike my own. On our way home, my friend was annoyed at me. I had bought too many things, she thought. She didn’t say so. I could see it on her face. But only in very rare circumstances must plants be bought in ones. The minimum is three, preferably five, and then up from that. To me, in a garden almost everything by itself is wrong. If it is very beautiful, more of it will do. If space limits it to one, then you must just say so. The feeling against planting only one must be widespread. When you must plant only one of anything, you are told to regard it as a specimen; but a specimen is so unfamiliar, so unwarm, so ungardenlike. One of anything, children, plants, is so tight-fisted I could cry.