000 02413nam a2200229Ia 4500
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003 OSt
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010 _a99-26204
020 _a9780374281861
040 _c--
050 _aSB455.K48 1999
082 _a635--
_bdc21
245 0 _aMy Garden (Book):
_c/ Jamaica Kincaid
260 _aNY;
_bFarrar Straus & Giroux;
_c1999
300 _a230p;
_c24x16cm
520 _aThe author offers a literary celebration of the art of gardening, discussing her favorite plants, her horticultural sources of inspiration, and famous gardens around the world. "I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind's eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know and even now do not know." Celebrated novelist Kincaid (The Autobiography of My Mother) should delight fans of her fiction and connoisseurs of the literature of horticulture with this personable and brightly descriptive, if somewhat rambling, book-length essay, most of it about her own garden in Vermont. Kincaid (who last year edited the anthology My Favorite Plant) shuttles constantly and with ease between the practical, technical difficulties of gardening and the larger meanings it makes available. She asks herself why her new weeping wisterias won't look right on her stone terrace; why her Carpinus betulus Pendula looks so lonely amid poppies and "late-blooming monkshood"; what's wrong with roses, and what's good about Blue Lake green beans; and how to stack up stones. But she also coaxes from her plot of earth more philosophical and psychological questions--inquiries about geography, heritage, marriage, motherhood, power; "how to make a house a home"; whether and for whom "to name is to possess." Kincaid's Antiguan upbringing recurs as a point of comparison, a source of political insights and a focus of nostalgia: "it dawned on me that the garden I was making... resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it." A botany-centered trip to Kunming, China, gives the last chapter a welcome change of scene. Kincaid, her publisher and their designers have made of her meditations a remarkably attractive physical object, suffused outside and in by shades of green and decorated throughout with illustrations by Jill Fox. (Dec.)
546 _aEnglish
650 _aSB450.9-467.8 Gardens and gardening
_95624
942 _cBK
_2lcc
999 _c2122
_d2122