Drive through American suburbia and one landscaped yard differs little from another. Neatly clipped lawn, the same flowers and plants, all kept under control with an onslaught of poisons. Camille Dungy’s yard at her home in Fort Collins, Colorado, is nothing like that. She calls it rewilding her garden. Her book is Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
“I think a lot about the communities that I feel I am a part of and I’m connected with,” says Dungy. “And how frequently also those very same communities don’t necessarily seem to visualize me as a part of them. Often there are ways in which, as a Black woman, I might feel very connected, for instance, with gardening communities and then wander into them and people seem surprised that I’m there. In the book, I do a lot of showing some of these faces where I feel a deep connection and alignment but also revealing some of those places of purposeful or unconscious exclusion.”
In this memoir, Dungy taps into a long family history of gardeners as well as the contributions of Black Americans to our landscapes. As in our communities, our gardens, too, should exhibit diversity, she writes. She describes how she made changes over a seven-year span to her yard, differing from traditional plantings to native ones, bringing her young daughter along for the journey. During this journey, she tests the limits of those exclusions of the Black community, of pervasive racism that persists to this day. She also explores the trend of nature writers to explore nature in solitude, as if nature lovers must live in isolation.
“One of the reasons why that particular kind of suburban landscaping was so popular for so long was that there was a received idea of what beauty looked like, what a manicured yard should be,” Dungy says. “It had a particular kind of order, and that order happened to be a very simple color palette to it. As the move to rewilding home gardens has shifted, the American imagination of what is beautiful and what is welcome has also shifted. As we expand our mind, we expand our lives.”
Dungy is the author also of the new poetry collection, America, A Love Story; the essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers; and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.
Dungy will be taking part in the Kalamazoo Valley Community College Visiting Writer Series on October 15.
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