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forms. I saw this scene over and over.
    That day, for lunch, the vegetable was something I knew by the name of “christophine” and which was familiar to Sunam by another name in Nepali. It is a soft, fleshy, watery fruit originating from somewhere I do not know but is used as a vegetable by people who come from the tropical parts of the world. It is not grown in Antigua, the island in the Caribbean where I am from, but it was grown on the island of Dominica, the island my mother is from. This vegetable was a staple of her diet when she had lived there, and I was remembering the lengths to which she would go to find it and incorporate it in my diet. I hated it then, and so imagine my surprise to find it for lunch in a small village in Nepal. It was the most delicious thing I ever tasted.
    From the place we ate our lunch, the center of a little village full of people and many of the things that come with them, I could see ahead of me, my way forward, a landscape of red-colored boulders arranged as if deliberate and at the same time the result of a geographic catastrophe. I was making this trip with the garden in mind to begin with; so everything I saw, I thought, How would this look in the garden? This was not the last time that I came to realize that the garden itself was a way of accommodating and making acceptable, comfortable, familiar, the wild, the strange. Above us were some large brown rocks and they seemed firmly placed. So strange, I thought, How would I get to them? I thought, Once I got to them, I thought, Life would be settled, I thought. Much to my surprise, I walked up to them and was in them, and found a place to take a pee and then walked some more into a forest of gingers ( Hedychium ) in flower, skullcaps in flower, Osbeckia in flower, Euphorbia in flower, Arisaema in flower—and the botanists, Dan and Bleddyn, especially were sad. They were not just sad, they began to sulk, and Dan complained to me about all that walking (two days) with no seeds to collect and Bleddyn complained to Sue (his wife) that there were no seeds to collect. We were only two days out, Sue said to Bleddyn. I said to Dan, We were still in the tropics. But they knew that. The day was hot. Sue had held her umbrella over her head, protecting herself from all that heat, and I wished again and again that I had brought one with me.
    The forest of gingers was actually a swath of cultivated farmland. People were farming spices, for local consumption, and when I found this out, their guarded and circumspect relationship to me did not seem so inexplicable. While walking through this forest of the gingers I saw Dicentra scandens, Agapetes serpens, an epiphytic rhododendron, Begonia, Strobilanthes (blue and white), a yellow impatiens that Bleddyn said was not gardenworthy, Philodendron, Monstera deliciosa, Hydrangea aspera (subsp. Robusta, Bleddyn said to me), Tricyertis maculata, Arisaema tortuosum, Amorphophallus bulbifera, Osbeckia . Except for Dicentra scandens (the yellow-flowered climbing bleeding heart) and Begonia —though not this particular one—none of the plants were familiar to me.
    At half past three in the afternoon we reached the village of Chichila. We had started the morning in Mani Bhanjyang at about four thousand feet and had walked up two thousand feet to Chichila. It was still hot but the clouds were coming in from Makalu, or so I was told, because if the clouds had not been coming, I would have been able to see the great Makalu, a mountain that I had never even heard of until I was nearing Chichila and every passerby greeted me with the word “ Nemaste ” and then “ Makalu .” But we were not going to Makalu. We were going to look for flowers, or rather the seeds of flowers. Walking around the the village I saw little gardens in which were cultivated squash, corn, marigolds, and dahlias. We sat on a public bench in the hot sun and drank some beer we had bought. There was no other way for