Soil

Memoirs can be delightful, too, although they also have a bad rap for being depressing! This is one of my favorite Earth-based recent nonfiction reads. It focuses on the joys of gardening—even in a small suburban plot—and focuses on being a black gardener in a predominately white town.

The plants she grows are used as a metaphor to discuss cultural diversity, particularly in how we must cultivate diverse and intersectional language to protect our planet. Dungy is also the editor of an anthology entitled Black Nature, which covers decades of poetry by Black writers. 

Dungy’s beautiful book demonstrates that the wild doesn’t have to be a pristine mountain wilderness, far removed from other people. The wild in her book is a place she creates herself by turning a suburban yard into a refuge of wild plants and critters.

As a lazy gardener, I admired the astonishing amount of labor she put into replacing rocks and lawns with beautiful blooms while battling bindweed and other undesirables. I related to her struggles with parenting and writing through the pandemic, and I appreciated her musings on colonialism and racial violence. Having read her book, I might even… show more.

Camille T. Dungy offers a memoir of her Fort Collins garden, the soil and the history it holds, and her experiences as a mother, a Black woman, and a gardener.

I, too, love gardens, and restoring my plot of earth to something more sustainable. The soil holds so much more than plants, and I love this book for revealing that to me.