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Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others.

This is the best book I’ve read this year.

Soil has an appropriate subtitle, succinctly naming some of the most important elements of what it offers. Camille Dungy is Black, a woman, a mother, and she is determined to grow a garden in the backyard of the home she moves to with husband Ray and daughter Callie in 2013. Their new home is in Fort Collins, Colorado, an overwhelming white city in an overwhelmingly white state*, which is also Dungy’s home state. “Black people are, and always have been, planted everywhere in this country.” They come from California, where Callie was born; Ray is from New York.

Dungy, a respected poet and academic, comes to Fort Collins to teach at Colorado State University. She has always appreciated gardens, gardening, flowers; she comes from gardeners. As a Black person, and as a woman, she has no choice but to track the unjust and frightening trends in the world around her. As a mother, she must balance her work life – her entire life – against the needs of a child. These intersections of identity define the experience she describes in this book, which is a memoir of gardening, as a Black mother, in Fort Collins, in the United States, in a time that includes the 2016 election, the COVID pandemic, numerous murders of Black Americans by police and vigilantes, climate change and environmental degradation, and increasing wildfires in the American West. These are a few of her concerns. In the same sense that every space is political and every person with an interest in humanity’s direction is politically engaged… of course gardening is about race. Everything is about race. “One thing always leads into another here,” she writes, but that’s everywhere, too.

I see this book as a braided essay, in chapters. Dungy chronicles her life, and snippets of Ray’s and of Callie’s, mostly in terms of her garden; but gardening is inextricable from the history of Fort Collins, of Colorado, of the country, of Black Americans. She interrogates history and also literature, particularly nature writing, whose tradition is overwhelmingly white, nearly as overwhelmingly male, and largely free of domestic details, as in, do any of these people ever do laundry? Did you know John Muir had a wife and kids? “What folly to separate the urgent life will of the hollyhock outside my door from the other lives, the family, I hold dear. My life demands a radically domestic ecological thought.” Annie Dillard receives special attention, as does poet Anne Spencer. Dungy writes about the fear her family feels on the night of the 2016 election, and the fear they feel–achingly, that her young child feels–when they hear yet another story like that of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was killed by police in Aurora, Colorado in 2019. It’s all interconnected.

The craft of Dungy’s braid is exquisite, and her points are razor-sharp, wise, true. Because she’s a poet, her writing is obviously strong, too, lyric and imagistic and color-saturated and lovely. She wields metaphor to great effect. “Some large part of gardening, like some large part of living, is figuring out what to cut and when.” It’s just an all-around beautiful book. It made me cry, and it made me pause; it wasn’t always joyful, because nothing true is. Whew.

“I am no angel,” writes Dungy, about her own failure to live flawlessly with regards to “build[ing] a more equitable and sustainable world.” Nobody’s getting it exactly right, but we should still try. Similarly, she wrestles with being a gardener and nature lover when there’s so much she doesn’t know–but she’s learning. “When I told Ray I didn’t know the proper name for the broken digging tool, he didn’t laugh at me. He accepted the fact that I am still and always learning.” (This is one of the attributes I love most in a human: to be still and always learning. Also, there are some sweet notes about a good marriage in this book, too.)

On the simplest literal level, I loved Dungy’s writing about her garden. She works to reclaim the yard of the house they purchase from sedately manicured garden plots, lots of lawn, and river rocks over plasticized landscaping fabric. The aim is to restore more native plants and those that will be drought-resistant, pollinator-friendly, and friendlier to more wildlife in general. These are goals I share in principle, at my own little house, but in practice I’m pretty daunted by the work involved. I do not love the work of gardening nearly as much as Dungy does, and she is honest about how much work it is. I wish I were more like her, in this respect and others. It’s inspirational.

Thank you, Liz, for the recommendation. Like its lovely dust cover and endpapers (I had to go back and tell Liz, who listened to the audiobook, to get a print copy!), this is just a gorgeous book.

*84.5% and 86% “white alone,” respectively, according to the 2022 US Census Bureau QuickFacts sheets for city and state.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, Liz, memoir, nature, nonfiction, race |