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by Jamaica Kincaid
One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves.
Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily.
The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.
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"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Kincaid blends a fertile inner life, botanical and colonial history, gardening lore, and her long gardening experience to create a rich, rewarding read." - Library Journal
"Altogether, a fascinating cornucopia to consort with on nights when the garden is at rest." - Booklist
"Kincaid's unique style, replete with odd parentheses (the title, for example), asides, deliberate repetitions, and rhetorical questions, draws the reader into her personal world of anxieties, hopes, and joys. Kincaid has given her fellow gardeners something far more engrossing than seed catalogues to look forward to this winter." - Kirkus
This information about My Garden was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jamaica Kincaid, novelist, memoirist, and essayist, lives in Vermont with her husband and children. She teaches at Harvard University.
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