Quote by Olive Senior: “Nothing in the garden happens by accident.”

A garden is a human creation — every plant reflects a choice, a history, a value. Senior uses the garden as a metaphor for culture and history: everything we inherit, grow, and tend was deliberately placed there by someone, often someone with power over others.

Gardening in the Tropics was published in 1994, a period when Caribbean literature was gaining significant international recognition. Senior used the botanical garden — a colonial institution established to extract and classify tropical plants — as a lens for examining how Caribbean landscapes were organized by colonial power and whose labor shaped them.

Jamaican poet and short story writer whose work draws on Caribbean folk culture, women's lives, and the natural world. Her debut collection Summer Lightning won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1987, and her poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics is a celebrated meditation on Caribbean identity and history.