Among Flowers by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

catalogue I simply move on. I know something native to Guatemala or to Chile will only last in Vermont if grown in a clay pot. And it was so with almost everything that we collected above Chyamtang. I could grow it in a pot or as an annual, the begonia, the Strobilanthes, the Osbeckia . Now we were on our way to collecting things I most definitely would be able to grow in my garden zone of USDA 5. At various times we walked by men, and they did not look at us. They seemed very absorbed by the reality of their lives and we were not part of it. We crossed the swaying bridge. Half a mile or so from this was the bamboo bridge where Dan had the frightening experience, and he took us to it. We naturally had our pictures taken at the approximate spot where Dan had been when the naughty boys had scared him. We then began the walk up, for to get to our desire—beautiful plants native to the Himalaya but that will grow happily in Vermont or somewhere like that—requires climbing high. The higher we got the hotter the sun. How glad I was to come upon a place where the now familiar marriage trees, the two Ficus (Ficus benghalensis and Ficus religiosa), were growing. Sue and I rested. Dan and Bleddyn had rested there perhaps fifteen minutes ago; they were, as usual, ahead of us. Three miles or so away from Chyamtang we had lunch, but it might as well have been ten hundred times that distance, for the night before seemed so long ago. The constant roar or sight of the Arun was no longer there. And the other thing was that the mountains, or the hills, or whatever they should properly be called, were no longer far away. We were now really in them. The landscape suddenly began to close in on us. When we began our trek so many days ago, Sunam would point out to me some snowcapped mountains in the distance that were shielding from my sight our destination. Now the shield itself was behind me, I could no longer see the mountains that had been the shield of my destination. If before I had not wondered if I was walking on the ledges of the world, now the thought would most certainly have occurred to me. We walked along the edges of some deceptively gentle sloping cliffs but any misstep would have sent us rolling down to the bottom of a ravine. Sometimes we were in the open and sometimes in thick forests of bamboo and maple, and all the time collecting Thalictrum, Lilium, impatiens, a species of Roscoea, Clematis connata, Deutzia, and the yellow-flowered climbing Dicentra . The forested places were the most wonderful for collecting from my point of view, for I began to see my garden again. Here suddenly we were walking on a carpet of the fallen leaves of Magnolia campbellii, and looking up I saw that I was in the thick of them and a hunt for fruits began. We found many fruits lying on the ground but most of their seeds were rotten. But growing in this area was Paris, and Dan and Bleddyn had found a form that was variegated in leaf. That was new to them and caused much excitement. But they had not found a plant with ripe seed, that is seed worth collecting, so in a frenzy we all began to look for more of this Paris with seed. None could be found. Perhaps among the most annoying things to me all along was that I could only identify plants that were already familiar to me; and then again, sometimes when confronted with a plant I knew really well before, when seeing it in a place that was new to me, I found it mysterious and foreign. And so while joining in the search for the new Paris, the one with the distinctly variegated leaves, everything I saw before me was a mystery and so therefore not important. When, in that moment, I came upon some fruits of Magnolia campbellii, its appearance familiar to me because it resembles the fruits of other magnolias, it seemed to me completely weird, unrecognizable; I remember my brain trying desperately to make sense of it, trying desperately to find a similar image stored so that the soggy, rotting,