In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing is a slim volume that covers a lot of ground. There are essays by well-known writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and Jamaica Kincaid, but American readers will likely be unfamiliar with most of the other contributors. The book is divided in thematic sections: The Garden Remembered, The Collective Garden, The Language of the Garden, and The Sustainable Garden. Fitzgerald writes of a long life in gardens (a childhood garden in Egypt with eucalyptus, lantana, and banyan; large gardens in Oxfordshire full of educational trial and error, and now a much smaller London garden). Like several of the essayists, she reflects on the importance of having a green space during the pandemic in which to find solace.
Several essays are by writers who are descendants of immigrants. I found Paul Mendez’s “The Earth I Inherit” especially poignant. His grandparents came to the industrial West Midlands of England from Jamaica in the 1950s, where they faced racial prejudice on a personal and national scale. They tried to coast beneath the notice of their neighbors by fitting in—planting fragrant plants to conceal ‘strange’ cooking smells that might incite ire, growing plants found in typical urban front gardens (roses, lavender, daffodils, herbs, and vegetables), avoiding anything that might seem outlandish or ostentatious. Still, they derived great pleasure from having even this small patch of earth to nurture and remind them of the home and heritage they left behind.
The communal experience of gardens is the subject of several writers, from a brief history of London’s squares, to the conversion of an abandoned cricket pitch in East London into a thriving community garden where the plants are as diverse as the gardeners, growing what reminds them of their own roots (in Bangladesh, the West Indies, and elsewhere).
Gardens are places where several of the essayists find common ground with their parents. Niellah Arboine and her mother spent many happy days wandering around Kew, but it is their time in the allotment plot that felt like paradise for the author as a child. She abandoned these visits as a teenager, but later reconnected with green spaces and growing things through a gardening group for women of color. During the pandemic, she returned to the allotment with her mother after a long absence; it was the only place they could safely spend time together during lockdown.
Another persistent thread in the essays is the therapeutic and restorative potential of gardens and gardening. Singapore-born Zing Tsjeng’s mother suffers from depression, but has always been an enthusiastic gardener, from tending orchids (which she nourishes with steeped banana peels) and lemongrass to the Japanese maple languishing in her daughter’s garden which she restores to good health. Although her mother has returned to Singapore, she continues to send gardening advice to her daughter, who is gradually becoming more of a gardener.
Poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s “What We Know, What We Grow at the End of the World” is philosophical and prompts thoughts of the garden as metaphor: “In a time during which it is necessary to ask what structures must be dismantled in order for all peoples to live freely and well, thoughts about what will need to be abolished come in tandem with those asking what we will need to learn to grow.”
Published in the Leaflet, Volume 8, Issue 12, December 2021