Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Excerpt)
Our garden regularly ruptures my sense of progress and process and time. There is the forward trajectory of days into months, seasons into years. June’s tight rosebuds will lead to July’s full-crowned blooms. Evident and irreversible change, straight forward as an arrow toward its mark. But there is revolution in the garden as well. And reversals. Months and seasons and days turning so far forward they bend backward. I stand in the past and in the future when I stand in the present of our garden. Just as with grief, neatly outlined stages double back and return well after or long before I expect them to appear or be over.
For two summers, the Viola adunica and Viola nuttallii I saved from Andy’s mower blades disappeared from the bed where I’d transplanted them. But as I walked around the yard one morning in 2017, I noticed the penny-size purple and yellow wild violets lifting stalks three inches from the ground, as if I were kneeling again on the hot July 2014 day when I dripped sweat into fresh holes I’d dug for those violets with a clay-caked trowel.
Trouble spots and sites of beauty erupt here again and again and again. The garden reminds me I must be both vigilant and patient.
The neighbors’ Norway maple wears the burnt-red leaves of autumn from the spring until they turn a deep, regal purple in the fall. In the tree’s shade, clusters of fragrant blue blazes hyssop reach the height of their floral display in early September, whereas the white blossoms of the early-blooming cutleaf anemone disclose themselves in the middle of May. When the tulips faded and the purple allium unfurled from green sheaths like butterflies emerging from chrysalides, Ray admitted that before living here he never realized that each plant has its own cycle. “I mean, it’s not like just one thing grows here,” he said. My husband is well past his fiftieth birthday, but he stood next to me with the embarrassed cheeks and eyes of a six-year-old child waiting to be scolded for not learning his lesson. “I know it’s crazy that it’s taken me this many years to realize that there are different seasons for different plants.”
Ray wondered how he could have lived so long without understanding the patterns that occur around us. I could blame the number of years he lived in densely built-up cities, but so much of our world is manufactured. Many of us do not have a chance to see these cycles in action. We can buy strawberries in the store no matter the season. Now that our family grows them in the garden, though, Ray and Callie and I see how the small perennial bushes progress from green, to flower, to fruit, to gray-brown clumps of dormant stems, and back through that cycle again.
Like the strawberry bushes, our alliums and tulips and Viola nuttallii and sunflowers and cutleaf anemone all keep their own cycles and seasons. Ray felt the soft green sheath around the purple allium’s flowerhead. “I’ve never had a chance to pay attention to these cycles before.”
Plants go into soil at different times and come up in their own time. Sometimes they seem to exist all at once. Sometimes not at all. This, too, is the reality of the speed, the slowness, the wildness of time as it passes in the garden.
CAMILLE DUNGY is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2023). Read more.
From SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy. Copyright © 2023 by Camille T. Dungy. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.