SOURCE: “Growing Pleasures,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 6, March, 2000, p. 5.

In the following review, Kumin gives a favorable evaluation of My Garden Book, although she expresses distaste for the book's graphic format.

Jamaica Kincaid's passion for growing things, hovering over them with encouraging words, cursing the withered failures [in My Garden Book], is one I understand. Though my organic garden is limited to vegetables, except for a few edible, therefore utilitarian, flowers such as nasturtiums and citrus marigolds, I share her compulsion to raise plants out of the earth. The dailiness of this attention, the worry over late frosts in May and premature ones in September, the need to provide sun-lovers with full sun, sometimes at the expense of lurking trees, the constant watering in times of reduced rainfall, the vigilant search for tomato hornworms, squash borers, slugs, mice, voles and rabbits all make up the...