Jamaica Kincaid grew up on the island of Antigua. She began writing for the New Yorker and went on to publish many books, including the novel Annie John and the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River. A number of her books have recently been reissued, or are forthcoming, from Picador in the UK.

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. They’re the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody. Their latest book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, was a Sunday Times number one bestseller. They have also co-edited A Garden Manifesto with the artist Richard Porter of Pilot Press.

From May to July 2024, Jamaica and Olivia discussed the garden as a false haven and the violent histories that manifest through horticulture.

Jamaica Kincaid:

Tell me, Olivia, what’s going on in your garden? In my own garden, I have just witnessed a lily appear out of the blue, so to speak. What is it called, that underground traveling that some plants like to do? In any case, I have never known a lily to do that.

Olivia Laing:

I have regal lilies, heavenly, and Sargent-like, and a lot of martagons. I planted Claude Shride this year, but I find it too sinister, too much like a melted candle. I also planted Snowy Morning, but I think it succumbed to lily beetle, or possibly just got squashed.

What I like about your brilliant book about gardens, My Garden Book (first published in 1991) is that it reveals the gardener’s bad character: covetous, greedy, inept, baffled by mistakes and mischance. The garden is never quite satisfactory, or it is but only for a minute before something else goes wrong. I’m amazed at the intensity of my emotions in the garden, the fury, the ridiculous despair, the constant uncertainty over how to proceed. We have honey fungus so sometimes a shrub will die right in front of my eyes.

The worst is a Lavelle hawthorn, which must once have been the most beautiful small tree and now is like something from a Hammer Horror film, sticking its claws in the air right next to where I eat my breakfast. And then there are all these dilemmas. Take it out: excise evidence of death! Make it look more beautiful, hide the fact that something went wrong. Or, on the other hand, leave it in situ, refuse the performance of perfection with all its ecologically deleterious consequences, and let it be a habitat for insects, and the blue tits who feast on them. I’m growing an akebia up it as a way of postponing the decision. I could add to this litany of disaster: blackspot on roses, bacterial root rot in my Benton irises, and the general impossibility of trying to make a luscious garden on pure Suffolk sand.

1. Martagon (Claude Shride)

Kincaid:

Are you growing a real L. martagon or one of those truly horrid hy-something or other. Let me go look it up before I pass my severe judgment. AH YES, I see it. L. martagon Claude Shride. I, at the present moment, find it a horror! And I see in my Van Engelen catalog, there are other horror presentations of the wonderful L. martagon called ‘Arabian Knight’, ‘Fairy Morning’, ‘Manitoba Morning’, ‘Sunny Morning’. How about a ‘Dark and Stormy Morning’? Why do the Plants people mess about with plants in this way? Why do they take a perfectly beautiful, simple presentation of something in nature, something that is not doing any harm to anyone, and then, to quote my late friend George W. S. Trow, ‘ugly-fy it a tad’? I read Reginald Farrer’s book The Dolomites – over ten years ago now – and liked it so much that I immediately went off to Italy to see some of the things he saw when he was wandering around up there. Days after I left Bolzano, I stumbled on a clump of the very upstanding, in bloom L. martagon. They were in the shade. They were a dark, purple-ish black. They were a little out of reach thank god, for just as how some people can’t resist changing the color of a flower, I can’t resist picking and clasping to myself a flower I had never seen before.

Laing:

I spent yesterday helping at my mother’s open garden. Does this happen in America? All the villages round here do open gardens at some point in the summer, with tea and not always very nice cake. Her garden used to be a donkey paddock and has the soil to prove it. I am very envious of her exuberance of dahlias, lupins, delphiniums, and especially roses. Mine are looking particularly sulky and diseased today, though I think it’s my mood, shaped by dipping into the news first thing. Gardening can’t change any of that, and sometimes it feels like a futile thing to do. But the garden is where I do my thinking. Why is the garden such a place for thought? Do you also find it has a funny, secretive relationship to writing, both in terms of structure and maintenance? I often like gardening the better of the two because it feels like something is always pushing back, subverting my will, having better ideas, but I have to say today I’m glad not to find molehills or lily beetle excrement inside yesterday’s sentences.

I want that Lilium martagon from the Dolomites so much I’m tempted to hike there with a spade. Not that I would ever dig up a wild plant!

But wait: do you only grow species plants? (For the uninitiated, this means plants in their wild form rather than named varieties that have been bred for cultivation.)

2. Canadense

Kincaid:

Only grow species? Are you joking? I am living in a postlapsarian world and when I see a beautiful something (Papaver ‘Patty’s Plum’, for instance) I don’t hesitate to enter deep covetousness. ‘I want that!’ is a current refrain in the silent recess of my small brain when I see a plant that appeals to me and I don’t stop to reflect on its origins: species or cultivar? Love is Love, I say to myself, as Pride month passes on and most likely to be replaced by a lot of gloom and shame. But, here we are, as the kids say.

As for helping your mother with her garden duties, well, I no longer have a mother to do that with, and in any case, her idea of her garden involved her liking the taste of the things/plants growing in it, all things/plants that she had planted herself, things/plants that she had been familiar with in some way, her particular way, and so her garden was hers in a way that couldn’t really be shared. Of course, like most gardeners I can trace my attachment to that place, the garden, to and through her. My own children were not at all kind to me in my love relation to the garden and often said to my face that they believed I love the garden much more than I love them. Who can say? Certainly not me!

Laing:

So, some major political changes in the last week! Though what week doesn’t have seismic changes these days? I woke up at 4 in the morning after the general election here, and watched Tory after Tory lose their seat. It was amazingly cathartic after the last ten years of, literally, total shit. Sewage in the water, children without beds, poverty so extreme rickets is back. And then France! Maybe the left isn’t dead after all. What does this all have to do with gardens? As I’ve been travelling around on book tour people have been asking about gardens and politics, gardens in terms of social justice and climate change. The fantasy I have – garden as solution – is of a public investment in apprenticeships, training young people to become gardeners, and setting them to work in public gardens – gardens of complexity and beauty. I was so cheered by the biodiversity audit that Great Dixter carried out a few years ago, with its revelation that the greatest biodiversity on their site wasn’t in the wilder areas like the woods or meadow, but in the ornamental garden itself. The profusion of different types of flowers, the massively extended flowering season that their method of succession planting facilitates, and constant disruption of the gardeners’ work all combine to create a vast array of habitats, helped by a new untidiness and willingness to leave plants to rot and dead wood in situ.

Gardening benefits the planet and the gardener too: what a revelation! Not perhaps to any attentive gardener, but to politicians, yes. Urban botanic gardens cool cities in heatwaves better even than trees, so let’s have lots of them, and lots of people at work in them. These are utopian ideas, and as with art something in me blanches at the sense that gardens must be useful, beneficial, uplifting. But it’s not as if selfish gardens are going anywhere.

3. Columbianum

Kincaid:

My dear Olivia, I have just returned from Brazil. The Brazil that I saw was green and green and green again. It wasn’t a dark green, or an old green, it was a green I had never encountered. I was reminded of that unsaintly seaman Christopher Columbus. In his first journal, on encountering the smothering innocence of what we now call the Caribbean, he had no real reference for what was before his eyes and he kept referring to the landscape he had had left behind in Spain because he could see that what lay before him was not readily comprehensible, was not like anything with which he was familiar at all; (remember he had been sailing around the coast of Africa for the Portuguese) in any case, something new was not what he wanted or expected, what he wanted and expected were things that could be commodified, he wanted the Goods. And so now here we are.

There is no way to make a sustainable garden except perhaps in our dreams. The garden itself is an ideal, an idyll, without knowledge of the absence of the ideal. Sustainability in the garden is like the prohibition against eating pork or beef or whatever the case may be. And yet we must strive, for it leads to thinking, which for the most part is a very bad idea, yet so necessary (I am quoting a rap song that my children and I used to listen to when they were children).

For me the garden is a place of incredible disturbance and violation, which I welcome. And why you ask? It is from disturbance and violation that we get Justice and I so fervently believe that Justice is a divine aspiration, in fact Justice is the ultimate form of Love.

Laing:

I got stuck in Naples because of the Microsoft outage – 8.5 million IT systems crashed worldwide – a reminder that computers control our world. I’d like to think the garden is outside that but of course it isn’t. Plants growing in industrial greenhouses, constantly turning so they don’t grow in one direction. Plants with passports, plants stopped at borders, an especial issue here since Brexit, with lorries from Dutch growers held up for days, until the plants are fried. I read your last letter first thing this morning and then went outside to think about it while cutting back foxglove and oxeye daisies and harvesting the seed in envelopes. It’s so satisfying, knocking the seed out of a spent daisy with your thumb. I was thinking of what you said about the garden and justice. I think people want the garden sometimes to be a haven from history, a place to retreat to, a present-moment feast of blooms. But of course, the garden is actually an archive, every plant bringing with it a narrative of past injustice, upheaval, shifts in wealth and taste. I was struck that we both alighted upon those malevolent gardeners, the Middletons, the slave-owning family who built opulent gardens in America and England, one of whom signed the Declaration of Independence. When I was investigating their garden-making, I wanted to trace the money, to see how they managed to conceal the violent and cruel origins of their vast wealth by way of a sort of exquisite screen made from plants. It’s so easy to indict figures from the past for this sort of behaviour, so much harder to see the ways in which it continues today. I’ve been reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein and I was struck by how she talked about the storefront of capitalism, the shiny shops with their shiny goods, and the hidden back end, where the work of extraction and manufacture takes place. She describes this realm as the Shadowlands, these sites of pollution and abuse that are relentlessly concealed from view. The garden can be a place to sleep, a dreamworld of willed ignorance, but I do think it can also be a place to wake up, to pay attention, to consider the question, and the work of justice.

Kincaid:

Olivia, it’s so good to have you back in my inbox. The garden as a Haven from the world: why should it be, when from our cultural (the Abrahamic) point of view the Haven became undone in the Garden? It seems an act of willful thinking to believe that the garden would relieve us of the world we have created.

And then you had to go and mention the Middletons of South Carolina, USA. Have you visited the garden there? It is a wonder, the way the garden is so artfully woven into the horror of Slavery and the people forced into it. The garden itself is thought to be designed by an Englishman but as far as I know, he remains unidentified. As I remember it, there were all the usual quadrants of beds planted with Camellias, but the great work of art is a series of artfully arranged crenulated folds have been placed in the knoll that leads down to a freshwater pond, the pond itself is in the shape of a butterfly. The water from the pond was released from time to time to flush out the salty water in which rice, the main crop commodity of the Middletons, was grown. The Middletons specialized in buying slaves from Angola because Angolans were familiar with rice cultivation. That Mr Middleton was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence is not unusual. Jefferson was a gardener and he was assigned the task of writing that wonderful document.

Not too long ago someone wrote an idiotic book called The Founding Gardeners. In fact the book should have been called The Founding Gardeners and the People They Dared to Enslave. Most of those Founding people owned other people and one of the secrets of that document, is if read properly, you would think the author and signers were slaves themselves. Dear Olivia, the garden as a place of retreat from the horrors of the world? Not for me. Nothing awakens my dulled mind than looking at one.

Here is a bouquet of Caladium ‘Fannie Munson’, I grew from some dried-up bulbs that looked as if they had passed out of the bowels of a mammal who lived in the desert and had been deposited there a long time ago.

Laing:

I’m still laughing at that last sentence. But also: ‘It seems an act of willful thinking to believe that the garden would relieve us of the world we have created.’ Yes! Garden as wake-up machine, sometimes pleasurable, nearly always frustrating. I have not been to Middleton Place, but I have been to the remains of the great, grotesque house they built in Suffolk with the spoils.

I find my best thinking happens when I’m out muddling around with secateurs, darting here and there without a particular plan, just doing the work as it arises. I’m not thinking in language, I’m not laboriously constructing sentences. But something is being solved or settled, and when I come back inside I find my thoughts have moved on to some place new. When I’m starting a new book I often find I’m obsessed with playing Tetris or Sudoku and I think it’s similar to that: I need a very involving surface activity while something else nearer the ocean floor does a different kind of thinking.

My other question, related to this one – what was it like collaborating with an artist for The Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children? Did you and Kara Walker go back and forth with drawings and words? I’m always fascinated by the shift between disciplines and what it provokes.

Kincaid:

The Garden (capital G) has become inextricably linked to my writing and thinking, whether I am in it, outside it or just lying in bed reading. There’s no real explanation that I can give.

Kara and I had no differences at all regarding our book. I sent her the letters of the alphabet and the plants’ names and she drew what she wanted. I suppose we both took some delight in each other’s imaginations, though I will always cede that hers is superior. We had no resistance to any of it except with the British publisher who insisted that we change the word ‘colored’, because it was the equivalent to the N-word in British English. We tried pointing out to her that there was a venerable institution called ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ in the US, but that did not sway her and so we have no British publisher for this book. What are colored people anyway? Isn’t white a color too? You could say that the title of the book An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children simply means that it is a book for all children, since all children would say, if forced to do so, that their skin has some color to it.

One more thing about Middleton: The great American Civil War General, William Tecumseh Sherman, in his drive south, after he had burned Atlanta to the ground, when he got to the Middleton plantation, he set that alight too.

My first rare white Hibiscus moscheutos opened today. It’s a ‘volunteer’ that I forgot to weed out years ago and it turned out to be the rare white of its kind. So what to do but enjoy the few truly good things that come our way?

Olivia Laing photographed by Sophie Davidson.