Garden hopping was when you leapt through a line of people's gardens in the dead of night. Only a few boys did it. The air rushed through you. You were like a phantom. You could have been anyone. It is an apt metaphor for the adoption business. Jonathan Rendall was adopted in the 1960s when it was easy. People could just pick out the children they wanted, right down to the colour of their hair. But what of the children themselves? And what happens when years later they trace their real parents? Garden Hopping is a harrowing, and often shocking, journey into the dark night of identity.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.