MY GARDEN (BOOK)

In this passionate and prickly collection of horticultural essays, Kincaid explores her love-hate relationship with gardening, which inspires in her both ''satisfaction and despair.'' In a potpourri of musings, the Antigua native enthuses about her favorite hollyhocks in her Vermont garden; rants about winter's frozen landscape (she spends the chilly months salivating over seed and bulb catalogs); details pilgrimages to Kew Gardens and Monet's Giverny; and compares the history of formal gardens with that of colonialism. Thanks to Kincaid's luxuriant insights (''Memory is a gardener's real palette''), it's a robust hybrid of memoir and gardener's journal. B+