Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
A “heartfelt and thoroughly enriching” (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders) work that expands on how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
“Brilliant and beautiful” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Reviews with the most likes.
“I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden. But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of this soil as well.”
This wonderful book is about the garden in Ft. Collins, CO that Camille T. Dungy, a professor at Colorado State University, cultivates. It is also about the history of nature writing in the US, and the historical relationship Black people have with land and gardens here. It's about ecology, understanding ecosystems and trying to work with them instead of dominating the landscape. There is a lot in this book that is not specifically about gardens, but bears directly on the garden that Dr. Dungy is building. I loved it and I think it's an important contribution to the nature writing genre.
