Genre
Non-fiction book
Setting and Context
The context of the narrator's life experiences, passions and love for gardening.
Narrator and Point of View
First-person narrative
Tone and Mood
Inspirational, hopeful, optimistic and fascinating
Protagonist and Antagonist
The narrator is the protagonist.
Major Conflict
The narrator has a mental impression of owning a perfect garden, but she does not know how to accomplish it.
Climax
The climax comes when the narrator manages to conceptualize her mental picture of perfect gardening into reality. She has various plants in her garden, which she uses in her research.
Foreshadowing
The intangibility of the narrator’s mental impression of a perfect garden foreshadowed her passion for plants.
Understatement
The association between plants and human beings is understated. For instance, the narrator is focused on the beauty of flowers, but the reader realizes that gardening has unspoken rules that must be adhered to.
Allusions
The story alludes to the significance of having a vision and finding ways of attaining that objective.
Imagery
The images of flora in Antigua depict sight imagery and give a metaphor that explains the relationship between human beings and plants. Sight imagery is further enhanced by the narrator's description of her perfect garden.
Paradox
The main paradox is that women are considered a weaker gender despite executing the hardest tasks in life like childbearing, custodianship and stewardship.
Parallelism
The roles of women in society parallel plants' sacrifice in beautifying the earth.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
Carpinus Belutus Pendula is a flower that has been personified because the narrator says he looks lonesome in the poppies.
