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I have often identified with Jamaica Kincaid’s question: ‘Why’ she asks, ‘must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility that comes with being a human being?’ Why indeed? In her writing Kincaid reads the garden as a metaphor for colonisation, the way in which nature is owned, histories erased, plants moved and exploited around the globe, and she shows the way in which the formal culture of gardening is so bound with ideas of Empire. She saw, as Foucault did, that ‘the garden is the smallest parcel of the world, and then it is the totality of the world.’