The Antiguan Backyard Garden Passed Down Four Generations
What is an Antiguan backyard garden?
An Antiguan backyard garden is the traditional home plot that feeds a family, a mix of herbs, peas, fruit trees and greens grown a few steps from the kitchen door, the way most country households on the island once lived. It is heritage and food security in the same patch of ground.
“That’s how we grew up,” Lorylin said. “My grandmother, my mother, she had a little backyard garden. That’s how most of us grew up, who lived in the country. There were papaya, there were eggplants. Some person had a mango tree. There was a pumpkin. And we’ll go in the garden and my grandmother will take whatever she wanted, pigeon peas, all different types of peas, and she’ll cook.” She followed the women into it, and when I said she had a green thumb, she just laughed. “Yeah, basically.” It is the living root of every garden eco stay we love across the Caribbean.
What did she learn from her grandmother?
She learned the plants, the uses and the patience from her grandmother, and one herb carries the whole inheritance. It is the anise.
“My grandmother would use it a lot when I was small,” she said. “I had so much of it that after I became an adult, I didn’t want to see it, smell it.” Her grandmother, she added, “was a baker.” Now Lorylin grows her own anise and uses the seed in pastries and tea, the same plant her grandmother baked with, come full circle. That is the quiet thing a black owned, family run stay preserves that a resort never could.
How does she keep the garden going?
She keeps it going by cutting rather than uprooting, so most plants give again and again from a single planting. She walked me bed by bed, and almost everything came back to use, not show.
The cutting trick
“We use the celery a lot in our foods in Antigua and Barbuda,” she said. “As they grow we pick the top, we cut the top and we use them in our foods.” The cutting is the trick she keeps repeating. “Usually we cut them at the bottom, and then they shoot up. You see, this one has been cut at the bottom.” Plant once, keep harvesting. At the garlic she was mid job. “I pulled them out and I planted back some, and I’m trying to dry these other ones off.” Most of the rest, she said, ends up in a pot. “Most of our herbs we use for tea,” the same teas in Lionel’s bush medicine patch.
The name that came down the line
Some of it is straight family memory. At the lemongrass she corrected the name. “My grandmother would call it the fever grass,” she said. “She would use it when we have the fever or something. But I understand it’s now called the lemongrass.” The remedy and the word both came down the same line.
Does she garden beyond the backyard?
Yes, Lorylin is a serious gardener beyond her own beds, a member of the island’s Horticultural Society who shows and sells her plants. The beds at Lamblion are kept the way a show garden is kept, because she shows them.
“I’m a member of the Horticultural Society here in Antigua and Barbuda,” she said, and twice a year or so she takes plants to the garden show and plant sale at Agave Gardens. “We use our plants to sell, to help with maintaining the gardens.” Her orchids, mostly purple, go to the flower show. That standard is part of why Lamblion ranks among the best eco stays in Antigua and the certified sustainable stays in the Caribbean.
Is she passing the garden on?
Yes, it is already moving down to the next generation, with her daughter taking the old plants and making something new from them. The line does not stop with her.
“My daughter told me she used them in a coleslaw, with carrots,” Lorylin said of the green papaya she grew up eating. “She shreds them and uses them.” And a good deal of the work is pulling things up, a bed of lettuce gone bitter, a patch of greens past its best. “These have been quite old, so I don’t expect much growth from them anymore,” she said, already planning to dig them out and start again. It is not nostalgia, it is constant, patient maintenance, the same work her grandmother did, the same instinct behind why a family run stay matters.
You can walk the beds with her on a stay. Lamblion is a black owned, self catering garden stay, one of the sustainable hotels across the Caribbean, with the verified facts on the Lamblion listing, bookable through Expedia.
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