My attachment in adult life to the garden begins in this way: shortly after I became a mother for the first time, my husband gave me a hoe, a rake, a spade, a fork, some flower seeds to mark the occasion of that thing known as Mother’s Day. It was my second Mother’s Day; for the first one he had given me a pair of earrings and I put them on a table in the kitchen and they were never seen again, by me, nor anyone else, not the lady who cleaned the house, not the women who helped me take care of my child, not my husband, not my child—no one admitted to ever seeing them again. I can’t remember if the seeds and tools were wrapped up, but I can remember that immediately on having them I went outside and dug up a large part of the small yard, a patch that had never been cultivated, and put all the seeds in the packets in the ground. And that was that, for nothing grew, the ground was improperly prepared, it was in the shade of a big oak tree and a big maple tree (those two trees really did grow in the same vicinity and I did not appreciate them then; so annoying, their leaves falling down in the autumn and dirtying up the yard, I thought then).

A man named Chet lived in the house right next to me and he could breathe properly only while attached to canisters filled with oxygen; then every once in a while he would come outside and smoke a cigarette, and while smoking a cigarette he would tend to these enormous tomatoes that he grew right up against the side of his house. The tomatoes were exposed fully to the sun in that position and he did not worry about poisonous toxins leaching out of the materials from which his house was built into the soil in which his tomatoes were grown. His tomatoes prospered near his house and they tasted most delicious; my plot of back yard upturned by me, which had made my hands blistered and unpleasant-looking, looked as if an animal of any kind had mistakenly thought something was buried there and had sought in vain to find it; no one looking at the mess I had made would think that a treasure of any kind, long lost, had finally been unearthed there.

I moved into another house not too far away and with a larger yard. Chet died and I am still ashamed that I never saw him again after I left my old house, and also I never attended his funeral, even though I knew of it, and when I now see his wife, Millie, she avoids me (though I am sure I avoid her, too, but I would rather think that it is she who is avoiding me). I moved to a house which had been the house of someone named Mrs. McGovern and she had just died, too, but I never knew her or even heard of her and so moving into her house carried no real feeling of her for me, until one day, my first spring spent in that new house and so in that new property, this happened: the autumn before, we had paid someone a large amount of money to regrade the lawn out back and it looked perfect enough, but that following spring lots of patches of maroon-colored leaf sprouts began to emerge from the newly reconstituted lawn out back. How annoyed I was, and just on the verge of calling up the lawn person to complain bitterly, when my new neighbor, Beth Winter, came over to see me and to talk to me about how enjoyable she found it to live with her family of a husband and three children in the very same house in which she grew up; on hearing of my complaints about the lawn person and seeing the maroon-colored leaf sprouts I had pointed out to her, she said, “But you know, Mrs. McGovern had a peony garden.” And that was how I learned what the new shoots of peonies look like and that was how I came to recognize a maple, but not that its Latin name is Acer; Latin names came later, with resistance.

That first spring in old Mrs. McGovern’s house (but she was long dead) I discovered her large old patch of daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) growing just outside the south-west kitchen window and Rob (Woolmington) came with his modest rototiller and made a largish square with it for my vegetable garden and then followed me around the outside perimeter of the house with the same modest rototiller as I directed him to turn up the soil, making beds in strange shapes, so that the house would eventually seem to be protected by a moat made not of water but the result of an enthusiastic beginning familiarity with horticulture.

This is how my garden began; then again, it would not be at all false to say that just at that moment I was reading a book and that book (written by the historian William Prescott) happened to be about the conquest of Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, and I came upon the flower called marigold and the flower called dahlia and the flower called zinnia, and after that the garden was to me more than the garden as I used to think of it. After that the garden was also something else.

By the time I was firmly living in Mrs. McGovern’s house (or the Yellow House, which is what the children came to call it, for it was painted yellow), I had begun to dig up, or to have dug up for me, parts of the lawn in the back of the house and parts of the lawn in the front of the house, into the most peculiar ungardenlike shapes. These beds—for I was attempting to make such a thing as flower beds—were odd in shape, odd in relation to the way flower beds usually look in a garden; I could see that they were odd and I could see that they did not look like the flower beds in gardens I admired, the gardens of my friends, the gardens portrayed in my books on gardening, but I couldn’t help that; I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind’s eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know and even now do not know. And this must be why: the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves, that any set idea of the garden, any set picture, is a provocation to me.

It was not until I was living in Dr. Woodworth’s house (the Brown Shingled House with Red Shutters) some years later that I came to understand the shape of the beds. In Dr. Woodworth’s house, I had much more space, I had a lawn, and then beyond the lawn I had some acres. The lawn of Dr. Woodworth’s house was bigger than the lawn at old Mrs. McGovern’s house, and so my beds were bigger, their shapes more strange, more not the usual shape of beds in a proper garden, and they became so much more difficult to explain to other gardeners who had more experience with a garden than I and more of an established aesthetic of a garden than I. “What is this?” I have been asked. “What are you trying to do here?” I have been asked. Sometimes I would reply by saying, “I don’t really know,” or sometimes I would reply “ … . … . … .” (with absolute silence). When it dawned on me that the garden I was making (and am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it, I did not tell this to the gardeners who had asked me to explain the thing I was doing, or to explain what I was trying to do; I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).