Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas

"At the beginning of the book, as Kincaid is leaving to go in search of the elusive meconopsis (Himalayan poppy) in Nepal, she tells us she ‘had the strange sensation that I might be seeing everything in the way I was seeing it for the last time’. This sense of the journey being significant is reiterated in the repetition of the phrase, ‘I left my home’. Although the book begins with the appearance of it being a writing assignment—to go somewhere and write about it—there is a sense from the start that this is much more than that, and that this journey is life-changing. The beauty of this book is in the richness of the writing and observation, which is hardly surprising for a writer of Kincaid’s skill, but it is also a call for us to re-see, to re-enter the world around us. Kincaid brings to the writing a gardener’s eye, and language, using plant names to open up this strange yet familiar landscape. One of my favourite lines, that I kept above my desk when working on All My Wild Mothers, is Kincaid’s observation of rhododendrons, in which she is ‘reminded again that every weed can be made into a treasure in the right circumstance’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It is a quiet book that asks us to re-see the natural world and its beauty, not in a grand way—in Kincaid’s walk it is the small flowers that are noticed not the immense landscapes—but in an intimate way, so that the awe we might feel in these strange and unknown places might equally be felt in our own back yards. The etymological root of respect is ‘to look back upon, to re-see’, and for me, this is what Among Flowers asks us, as readers and as people, to do."