Madalene, Louisa, Jamaica, and Kara

My gardening angels.

This will be short. I’m working on a very touchy laptop, in a place that has much to recommend it except reliable electricity and WiFi connections. The scream you heard a short while ago was when a chunk of narrative disappeared for the third time. It should fly in the face of the Geneva Convention for me to have to reconstruct it again. So I’ll give you the bare bones which is really all you need.

Here goes—

I am trying to establish two gardens from unpromising land. One is sloped and full of rocks but the soil, after decades of lying fallow under layers of rotting leaves, is teeming with all manner of small and wiggly creatures that ensure plants will flourish. The second is a smorgasbord of more rocks, the largest the size of a studio apartment, with hard lifeless dirt in between.

I have shelves of garden books that will tell me what to do with each parcel. But I’ve decided only two embrace the contrariness of this corner of the natural world: The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa, Pages from the album of L. and M.S.Pasley Victorian Entomologists (Random House, 1980) and An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). These are strange companions. One was composed in the 1860s by upper middle class English girls. They were happily liberated from tutors and a distracted, if not disinterested, father to pursue their passionate study of insects and plants.

Madalene and Louisa on the hunt.

The other is a partnership between two of our country’s great women artists. Their collaboration explores the deep understanding and respect of the earth’s bounty and physical beauty that their ancestors brought to this country but was never able to claim for their own.

A spread from the book may be found in this except in The New Yorker.

The characters in these books would never have crossed paths in real life. They do now on my table because they teach the same important lessons about persevering in harsh environments. They are out of their elements—girls pursuing a passion believed to be fitting for only men; a whole people striving to sustain themselves in a hostile land. They are witty and beautiful in their struggles, and filled with passion to understand and create something beyond themselves.

I find myself sitting down with Madalene, Louisa, Jamaica, and Kara almost every day now. The five of us contemplate a difficult world, excited to discover what may be out there, what we could make of it, knowing there is no ownership in our achievements. Remembering the mere pleasure to be found in our labor.