Gardening has been on my mind lately because my mother was a gardener. She passed away last December, and I’ve been trying to remember those parts of her life that gave her drive and passion. She wasn’t a traditional gardener; she liked planting whatever looked good at the time. One summer she planted sunflowers that grew way over my head. Another year she seeded only mixes of wildflowers. I don’t think she planned most of the flowers that came up in a given season, and she didn’t care to section off parts of the garden for special treatment. She had a large square in the middle of the yard that was boxed in with old railroad ties that the neighbor must have given her. The porch was littered with pots of all makes and sizes.
Those summers I was never home, especially on the weekends, but sometimes I’d stop by to change clothes or grab a quick bite, and she would be there in the garden with her hair pulled high, her ponytail hanging out of the top of an old skate-brand visor I had stopped wearing years before. I see her now in the pink tee she often wore and a pair of denim shorts. Sunglasses and a smile. I moved away at 19, but on the rare occasions when I’d return home, I’d find her out back as if nothing had changed. Her hair would slowly grey. New cats would accumulate, similarly.
So it brought me great joy to read Camille Dungy’s memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, filled as it is with moments in which Dungy and her daughter, Callie, share time together in their backyard, cultivating a space all their own. They started their garden after they moved from Oakland, California, to Fort Collins, Colorado. They were acclimating to a new place, but also learning about the native plants and wildlife. In the process they were discovering what it was like to participate in the surrounding ecology. They named their garden the Prairie Project, and it’s the focus of Soil.
“A wilderness can exist in our own backyards,” Dungy writes. She walks us through the use of the term wilderness, from the Bible to the Old English to its common use today. This etymology helps her to explain her vision for the Prairie Project. “I don’t want to separate my life from other lives on the planet,” she writes, and I see my mom with her sunglasses and a smile, surrounded by her flowers and all her cats. Wilderness does not belong, Dungy argues, only to men like John Muir, lone geniuses who toiled in isolation. It demands community. “I am angry at Muir for what he left off his pages,” she admits, and for the disdain he showed for the Indigenous people who for centuries had protected the very land that he fought to conserve.
In Dungy’s view, the natural world and its beauty are for everyone, and we should value gardening not just for its utility but how it enriches our lives aesthetically. She animates this idea further by weaving her family history with accounts of African American gardeners going back generations. She cites Anne Spencer‘s garden in Lynchburg, Virginia, as just one example of natural beauty created for and by the Black community around the turn of the twentieth century. Dungy makes a point to say that while the recently freed slaves of that time relied on the food they grew, they also survived on the beauty they grew—a concept that gets overlooked in much of Muir’s writing.
But it’s not only about beauty for beauty’s sake. The pages that follow take this idea further, creating well-paced tension through. A rhythm develops. There are quiet moments in Dungy’s garden that reflect on the process of moving dirt and nurturing growth, which then lead to messier, louder moments of disruption, like when she tells the story of her mother growing up in Chicago, where someone tried to burn her family’s house down because they didn’t want a Black family in their neighborhood, showing such violent disruptions can ripple through families the same way drought and fire can stymie crop growth generations down the line.
During my mom’s final week in the hospital, I sat at her bedside. There was so much happening, I didn’t really know what to do aside from talk to the doctors and ask the nurses as many questions as I could. I didn’t know it was going to be her final week, though had I known, there wasn’t much I could have done differently. Except for one thing. I wish I’d gotten flowers to put in her room. It’s a small thing, and she probably wouldn’t have known they were there, but I could have set them on the table next to her bed, and maybe the smell would have brought her some relief. It could have reminded her of all those summers she spent in the backyard tending to her garden.
A few years before she passed, she stopped spending as much time out there, and eventually she wasn’t able to step out of the backdoor without help. Still, it was the one thing she always talked about. She was going to get healthy again, so she could continue working in her garden. It’s hard for me to say for sure what she got out of cultivating that small section of dirt, but I know it brought her joy and a sense of worth. She was a single parent, raising me and my sister, and I’d like to think among all the noise in her life, she was able to find some quiet in tending to her flowers.
Dungy speaks to this kind of buoyant hope and provides new ways to think about solitude and what it means to be quiet. She invokes Annie Dillard‘s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a way to frame the problem she sees with the solitary thinker (i.e. Muir), and explains the impact that book had on her as a younger reader. In writing Soil, she wanted to write her version of the Dillard classic—and knew in order to do it she’d need to bring more messiness to the page.
In thinking about Dillard’s work, along with work by Willa Cather, Sara Jewett, and Mary Oliver she questions these writers’ choice not to have children, whether they were forced to choose to put their work above having a family. As Dungy’s own approach to work and family isn’t either-or but both-and. This brings its own struggles. “What if there can be no quiet at my life’s center, or anywhere near?” she wonders. Ultimately, she argues for accepting a life that is messy, that is utterly lacking in solitude, because in this kind of life she still finds the fortitude to create and nurture regardless. And even Dungy’s seemingly solitary endeavor—her garden—leads to so many moments of community. She talks about her garden with her husband and friends, trades gardening tips with a neighbor, spends hours in the yard with her daughter.
These moments brought me so much joy while reading Soil; they reminded me of those times when I was able to sit with my mom in the backyard. We’d be out there on a sunny day, maybe for 30 minutes, maybe an hour. When there was nothing to talk about, she would turn the conversation to her plants. She didn’t know the Latin names of any of them, didn’t know the history of the man who named them. She didn’t have details about the rarity of each species, whether it was native or invasive. At least, none of that ever seemed to come up in conversation. The thing she liked to talk about was how she planted them. Where she had gotten the seeds. The way her cats brushed against them. She told stories about deer coming in from the woods that lined the back of her yard. Geese that appear at odd times of the year. Turkeys, too. She would light up as she told them, and she would look out at the flowers, knowing that she had planted them and how beautiful they had become. I like to believe that she told me these stories because she wanted to invite me into that space which she had created. It was her backyard and hers to share.
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