Black history in the garden

Jill Severn

You might think that gardening is the same for all of us: soil, sunlight, water and seeds are universal, right?

But in 2018, The New York Times reported this:

“DETROIT — For nearly two years, a man tilled an overgrown park in a half-abandoned Detroit neighborhood into a tiny urban farm, filling the earth with the seeds of kale and spinach and radishes. He was black. 

For half of that time, the man, Marc Peeples, 32, was the subject of dozens of calls to the police — the allegations growing more serious with each call — by three women who lived on a street facing the park. They were white.”

When the women’s allegations finally dragged Peeples into court, the judge dismissed the case, and called the charges “fabricated and rooted in racism.”

This is recent Black history.

But Black American history was going on for several hundred years before this incident, and it is woven into all eras and aspects of American life, including gardening.

In 2021, The New York Times published a collection of poems and essays about this history by Black gardeners, writers, activists and gardeners. The following excerpts from those essays may whet your appetite for more.

The first essay is by Stephen Satterfield, a food writer and host of the Netflix series “High on the Hog, How African American Cuisine Changed America.” He starts the American Black gardeners’ saga at the beginning:

“From the minute we were put on boats from Africa and taken over to the Western Hemisphere, we no longer owned even our own bodies,” said Jessica Gordon Nembhard, a professor of Africana Studies at John Jay College. “But some of the earliest activities we did was to garden together, in little kitchen gardens outside of the slave quarters on Sundays.”

Abra Lee is the author of "Conquer the Soil, Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country's Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers." In her New York Times essay she picks up the story in the early 20th century:

“. . . I was introduced to women I lovingly call “the Invincible Garden Ladies.” Women like Bessie Weaver, who entered the flower business in 1911 and was recognized by the International Florists’ Association as the first Black florist west of the Mississippi; Blanche Hurston, who owned a wildly successful flower farm in Jacksonville, Fla., in the 1920s; and Annie Mae Vann Reid, a self-taught plantswoman and owner of a 5-acre nursery and greenhouse who supplied customers across the United States with millions of seeds, flowers, shrubs, bulbs and vegetables from the 1920s until the mid-1960s.

Siraad Dirshe is a surfer, writer and social strategist. Here are excerpts from her essay:

“Much like me, many of today’s Black gardeners, who gather online and alongside each other outdoors, hold on tightly to their inheritance — knowledge seeds left behind by their families but also by pioneers and activists like Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Lou Hamer. For more than a century, these foremothers demonstrated how tending to the soil and growing food can be a powerful tool for Black liberation and imagination, making sure to document their work for us to call upon decades later.

Writers like Hurston and Alice Walker encouraged Black women to create independent sacred spaces, whether in the dirt or in their minds, so they could have places to dream and retreat from the world, because facing misogynoir — prejudice against Black women — is no easy feat. In works such as Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” which recently inspired a Netflix documentary, we see how liberating having this kind of place can be.”

Ron Finley lives in South Central Los Angeles, a food desert filled with fast food outlets and people with diabetes. He rose to fame when his TED talk about “gangster gardening” was viewed by over 4.5 million people. 

At one time he was threatened with arrest for planting vegetables in a parking strip in front of his home. He writes:

“I built a garden in my swimming pool.

I also have a garden on the street in front of my house, but I had to fight the City of Los Angeles to keep it. This fight was worth it because it changed the law and the possibilities and made it legal to grow food on the parkways of the city.”

Now he’s the leader of the Ron Finley Project, which teaches people of all ages to grow vegetables. In addition to improving their health, he reminds everyone that “growing vegetables is like printing money.”

His gardens also reconnect people with each other and the natural world, and open the way to greener, healthier urban environments.

Nature itself is the star of all these stories, and nature itself demonstrates of the value of diversity and inclusion. Delicious vegetables from every continent grow side by side in our gardens. Flowers bloom in many colors. So do we.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com