Post #103 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
by Carol Wall
Reviewed by Lanie Tankard
“We must cultivate our garden.”
—Voltaire, Candide
Carol Wall had a crummy yard. She hired a gardener to spruce it up a bit. In the end, she herself was transplanted.
If you’re looking for a gardening guide, with tips on the best time to plant, say, ranunculus bulbs, you may find some of what you seek in this 295-page book. Yet you, like Wall, will undoubtedly emerge with far more. For this memoir chronicles the saga of an improbable friendship between the groundskeeper and owner of a “compound” in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, nestled in a town of just under 100,000 between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains and the Potomac and James Rivers.
The man who tends her neighbor’s yard appears to know what he’s doing, so Wall decides to let him try his hand at hers—under her strict guidance, of course. She’s too busy in her chaotic life to bother with the work herself, but she has very definite ideas about what should take place in her soil there in the Old Dominion.
She obtains the man’s name and contact information from her neighbor and schedules an appointment for him to come by. Meanwhile she spots him working as a bagger at the local grocery store. Wall paints an amusing vignette as she guardedly observes him, framing a quick impression in her mind. On this one point alone, the book is worth reading, as an illustration of how far off the mark snap judgments can be.
It takes Wall the entire memoir to realize that Giles Owita, a native of Kenya, no more fits her original profile of him than the S. trifasciata laurentii potted plant he gives her fits on her cluttered mantel until she makes room for it. The Snake Plant, also a native of Africa, is one tough houseplant, hard to kill, which makes it an excellent selection for Wall because she hated to garden. Loathed it.
After a rocky start in regard to some azaleas, the relationship between Wall and Owita begins to smooth out. Life, as it is wont to do however, happens when you’re busy making other plans. Their seed packets contain some of the bleakest conditions of our time—breast cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, Down’s Syndrome, HIV/AIDS, and melanoma.
Wall fertilizes her memoir with some of the most salient issues of our common humanity—immigration, aging parents, segregation in the South, grief, lack of indoor plumbing around the globe, radiation treatments, separation of parents and children for economic survival, chemotherapy, and Einstein’s theory that space and time are elastic—to name but a few.
Surround them with a few plants, perhaps delphiniums and euphorbia, and the result is a memoir that opens slowly, like a tightly closed flower bud, with the turning of each page. It’s the gradually unfolding tale rather than the writing per se that drives this book.
Bienta, Owita’s wife, enters the memoir. So does Wall’s husband, Dick. Both Owita and Wall have three children each. They walk on and offstage, as do neighbors and townspeople, but it is the companionable bond between Owita and Wall that anchors the volume.
Wall’s narratives of situations in which one feels a loss of control are spot on. One of her strongest story threads is breast cancer. She describes with a deft and sure hand the vulnerability of that original moment when one first sees a shadow on a mammogram as if she were John Keats penning “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
As Wall’s high school English class studies the play Our Town, one of her students recites this line: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” That Thornton Wilder quote just about sums up Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening
Wall believes she will teach Mr. Owita a thing or two about horticulture and life when she makes his acquaintance, and by the last page realizes they’ve developed a professor/student relationship…with her sitting at his feet learning.
As Dr. Giles Owita, a native of Kenya, once said, “Illness comes into each life, but we must not let it define us.”
You can watch a video of Wall discussing her memoir here.
Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening
is a joy to hold in your hands for its simple eloquence. Kudos to Lisa Amoroso for the jacket design! The reader can almost sense the jute fibers in the burlap-textured cover, as well as feel the coarse strands of hemp in the brown twine that ties a lifelike sprig of poignant purple flowers round the book.
Carol Wall’s memoir was published March 4, 2014, under the Amy Einhorn imprint, which is another fascinating story that can be found here.
Lanie Tankard is a freelance writer and editor in Austin, Texas. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, she has also been an editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.
Her review of Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, which appeared here on Women’s Memoirs in 2010, will be included in a study guide for German high school students, Abiturpruefung Englisch Baden-Württemberg 2015, under the English Literature theme “Challenges and Choices in an Insecure World.“ Stark Verlag, a German subsidiary of the UK’s Pearson Education, will publish the book in the summer of 2014.
