The Garden Paradox
Ironically, the way that Kincaid posits the priceless of value of a garden to the gardener is through a metaphorical rendering of its lack of value. The paradox is made crystal clear though the author’s precision of imagery; what makes a garden valuable is the very fact it is doomed by nature to lose all value:
“In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy; time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.”
Nasty Nasturtiums
Kincaid holds the gardens of Impressionist painter Claude Monet to the highest esteem. His paintings of his garden are the most familiar of any artist and she claims to have never met anyone who raised a garden without something growing that is portrayed in one of Monet’s paintings of his garden. For most it is hollyhocks; the author takes a stab at nasturtiums, with the result being that:
“His looked like a painting—the way all natural beauty looks. Mine were just a planting of nasturtiums.”
The Regional Character of Cemeteries
Winter is down time for the gardening aficionado. This is especially true in New England where just getting through the layers of snow would be a major undertaking, much less tending to the plants. In a metaphorical rhapsody on the facts of this reality, the reader gets to learn something most probably did not know:
“the raised beds are covered with snow, like a graveyard, but not a graveyard in New England, with its orderliness and neatness and sense of that’s-that, but more like a graveyard in a place where I am from, a warm place, where the grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth, because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes their actions are more significant, more profound than whey they were alive, and so no square structure made out of concrete can contain them.”
The Endless Winter
Kincaid writes of the very day in spring in which a spring-like day finally appeared. It is a wondrously joyous time for her with the sun actually giving off heat, the grass almost turning greed right before her eyes and the last remaining snow melting away. And yet, despite all these positive signs:
“winter, like a tiresome person who isn’t much like in the first place, would not go away.”
The Inconstant Gardener
For a book about the joys of gardening—at one point a very extended metaphor that makes the one about graveyards look positively terse describes how even being irritated by gardening is pleasurable—there is one passage which is particularly surprising. A confession of sorts but couched within philosophical self-reflection of the fundamental character of the author. She is not a garden by nature, but, apparently, will:
“I am not in nature. I do not find the world furnished like a room, with cushioned seats and rich-colored rugs. To me, the world is cracked, unwhole, not pure, accidental; and the idea of moments of joy for no reason is very strange.”
