I am starting with a link that serves as a sort of bridge between Olivia Laing’s Garden Against Time and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book). It is a conversation between the two authors. In some ways, this conversation, which is about gardening, underscores the different communication/writing styles of the two authors as they both tackle the politics of gardening in their respective books: who has the resources to have and maintain a garden. I might add that they both approach the topic from very different social backgrounds: Laing is British and Kincaid is Antiguan, descended from people enslaved by the British.
Several of the people in the group discussion found Kincaid’s writing style very difficult and, to some extent, uncomfortable. As one person put it, life is too short to be so unhappy. This resonates with some of Kincaid’s own words: “Perversely, I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all-absolutely not at all-interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.” [This quote was printed in a daily email I receive from the Literary Hub] Others in the group, however, did not find her writing to be unusual or abrasive. Maybe liking or not liking Kincaid’s work could be part of an optimism test?
Perhaps not surprisingly, given her writing style, Jamaica Kincaid does not have a website that I could find. There are, however, many articles about, and interviews with, this intriguing author. I suggest wikipedia as an apparently complete biography based on what I’ve read thus far: .
Although Kincaid writes about her gardens in Vermont, she is from Antigua and makes numerous references to the differences in climate and the differences between life there (in Antigua) and here (Vermont and environs). So, for those of us (that would be me) who knew nothing about Antigua, we began with some basic information.
Things to do in Antigua
Maps
More maps
One history of Antigua
Wikipedia’s commentary on Antiqua
And because I am a sucker for rabbit holes, I also found The History of the Island of Antiqua, one of the leeward Caribbees in the West Indies from the first settlement in 1635 to the present time. By Vere Langford Oliver, this tome (part of a series apparently) was published in 1896. So the then present time was about 125 years ago compared to our current present time.
One other link I found was a purported history of Antigua. I mention it and include the link because it reflects a growing problem I see with the internet. I’m a retired professor, what can I say. In this day of very easily spread misinformation – deliberate or not – this video struck me first by the AI (or what I think of as AI) monotone voice. Looking a bit more deeply, I could find no information about the posting group and, not surprisingly, there were no references cited. A number of the history youtube channels do include their sources although you might have to hunt for them. This particular video seemed to be reasonably accurate but there are better resources for those who want to learn about Antigua. Now more than ever, it is important to pay attention to your sources and do your best to ascertain the truthfulness/factualness of the presented material.
We watched a couple interviews with her.
This 9:51 interview was conducted by “Danish writer Merete Pryds Helle in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2021 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.” (And, yes, there is such a museum in Denmark)
From the youtube description: The Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid speaks about her relationship to gardening. “The naming of plants means the possession, which leads me to Christopher Columbus and the naming of the world. You possess the world by putting a name on it, and then you begin to understand it.” Jamaica Kincaid got her interest in gardening from her mother. She started to plant things, “and nothing would grow” when she had children. “Nothing is more inspiring than failure. When I fail at something, I keep doing it. So, I kept gardening. And it became an obsession, it was very hard on my family because I could abandon everything for the garden.” It continues on the website.
All I can say is that you can’t go wrong with an interview that takes place at the Missouri Botanical Garden! This 35:39 one is from 2024. One bit I liked is that there are many still images of Kincaid.
From the youtube description: Esteemed author and recipient of the 2024 St. Louis Literary Award, Jamaica Kincaid, sits down with Jessica Pierce at the Missouri Botanical Garden to reflect on her life’s work and the beauty of the natural world.
This more recent interview from 2025 is longer and focused on a more recent book, a collaboration with artist Kara Walker. But the topics are those that are important to Kincaid. We did watch only the first few minutes of this one, given that it’s close to an hour – 58:32 Feb 10, 2025.
From the youtube description: Novelist Jamaica Kincaid is renowned as a prolific writer on family relationships and her native Antigua. She is also an avid gardener and in her recent work, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, she honors plant life with honesty as well as wit, offering an important look at how legacies of empire and slavery shape where and why we grow certain crops. Join Kincaid as she connects with Chicago Humanities to expand on the ABCs of plants that define our world and the truths of colonial history that manifest in our gardens.
Then, going backwards in time. Another long interview (1:18:03), this one was conducted at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in 2013.
From the youtube description: Since her first collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid has been a leading chronicler of Caribbean culture and tradition. This discussion between Kincaid and Ru Freeman reveals the disparity between the way the world is and the way it could be.
Finally, the earliest interview (28:06) I found with her dates back to 1996 so there’s an opportunity to watch her evolution through these few interviews I’ve selected here, although I have not put the links in in chronological order. This one predates My Garden (Book), which was published in 1999.
From the youtube description: Author Jamaica Kincaid discusses her influences as a writer and her latest novel, “The Autobiography of My Mother.”
And then, just bits of things that I wanted to learn more about.
Robert Woodworth house: Kincaid New Yorker article. This one is rather nice because it is about the house she lived in, has a photograph of the house, and is written by her as one of her New Yorker pieces.
On p. 138, she mentions a plant called ‘six sixty-six’. I had never heard of such a thing, but here it is. I confess that I have no idea how reliable the information on this particular website is but I couldn’t find anything else as directly related to this plant.
On p. 140, she was discussing her reaction to a book that suggested that people in tropical climates didn’t garden as Europeans do. It brought to mind an article by Rina Swentzell, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico and a former faculty member in the School of Archtecture and Planning at UNM. She described the differences in architecture and landscaping between her Pueblo and the American schools superimposed on the landscape.
Continuing with Kincaid’s reaction to the tropical garden book, on p. 141 of her book, she mentioned an image in that book with text arguing that “shortage of labour was never a problem in the maintenance of European features in large colonial gardens.” The image in the Tropical Gardens was described clearly enough that I was able to find it.
Off and on throughout the book Kincaid mentions Daniel Hinkley. Here’s his website as well as an interview with him about his work at Monrovia.
Middleton Place was mentioned mostly by Olivia Laing. One of its most striking features is its rolling lawn the undulates toward the river. It is hard for me to understand just how much the landscapes of England (and Europe I imagine) where manipulated and changed by the designers like Capability Brown, but I do have a sense of how South Carolina looks so the extent of the restructuring of the landscape if far more evident.
I forget where in the book she mentioned it, but the glass flowers at Harvard are truly spectacular.
We wrapped up the discussion with some images of Jamaica Kincaid’s garden. This article is actually an interview about her most recent book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, but it’s all about gardening one way or another.