Opinion: The exciting possibilities that open up when you rip up your lawn

Now that it’s spring (and summer isn’t far behind) it’s wonderful to find ways to grow plants — whether in a community plot, a yard or even in a balcony pot — and to savor the possibilities of growth and renewal gardens can offer us.

Tess Taylor - Adrianne Mathiowetz

This spring I was also companioned by “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden” — Camille Dungy’s provocative, thoughtful and lush book about native plants, diversity and the roots we put down to make a home. Dungy, whose honors include an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a Guggenheim, is the author of four books of poetry and another book of essays.

In “Soil,” Dungy recounts taking a grass and rockscape lawn in a suburban neighborhood and transforming it into an ecosystem for birds, bugs, rabbits and native plants. We talked together about the implications of gardening as a political and social act.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Tess Taylor: In this book, one of the first things that you say that just knocked my socks off was “whether in a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden.” Can you say more about what you mean by that?

Camilly Dungy: What I mean by “politically engaged person” is any person with a vested interest in the way that we treat others and this planet. So the definition of what a “political person” is, is very big.

There are two reasons I think that gardens are important for people who have a vested interest in the way we treat other people and this planet. One: gardens are spaces of rejuvenation and regeneration, and peace. And that is necessary. But also, gardens are places where I learn a lot about patience, growth, entanglement and surprising manifestations of beauty. And those of us doing the very difficult work of trying to build a more generous, loving, sustainable supportive culture, community or planet need examples of patience, beauty and grace. The garden gives me those again and again.

Taylor: The journey that happens in this book is moving to Colorado and inheriting a house with a very big lawn and a lot of rock beds. And it’s about transforming those, one by one. If we were to be visiting your garden today, what would it be like?

Dungy: My family lives in a place where it could be very likely to snow through about mid-May. So I’ve had to learn to garden with an eye towards that. It’s not “extreme:” it’s the weather for this place. But it’s not Mediterranean, right?  In general, native plants have been easier to tend. One of the wonders of native plants is that when it snows in May, or in the first week of September, they just shake it off and just keep chugging along. I realize that I need plants that are not as finicky and not as tender so I can feel like a success.

Meanwhile, the places where we have native plants and non-invasive naturalized plants are so much more interesting than a lawn. I look out from inside my house while I’m washing the dishes, and I can see all of these creatures frolicking. I can see mountain cottontails and chickadees and pine Siskins and gold finches and all kinds of native damsel flies and dragon flies. It’s like a prairie safari out there, because I have moved away from the monoculture of the lawn, and returned that space to a chaotic, but fruitful and fertile landscape.

Taylor: Speaking of models, or of what we need or don’t: Throughout the book you write about other women artists, who sometimes have made art out of homes, their gardens, their domestic spaces: I’m thinking of Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Cassatt. Some of them had really small jewelbox spaces. Is there a throughline here, or an argument with or between these thinkers? How do they influence you?

Dungy: I was writing “Soil” in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic shutdowns. I had sometimes just 20 minutes a day to dedicate to writing. Sometimes all I had was this tiny life raft of time to think about things that I think about, to engage other art and other thinkers who have helped to shape me or who I have resisted, or embraced, or sometimes a little bit of both.

Part of “Soil” is thinking about what I have learned about what it means to be an artist, a writer, a mother, an environmental thinker – and how I learned it, and from whom.  All this was magnified in a time when I was overseeing my daughter’s remote schooling.  I was thinking very, very consciously about what she was learning, what I had absorbed through my own time as a student, and how well any of these lessons were going to serve us in the present or the future.

Taylor: I was thinking about domestic space and messiness, and about the models that serve us and don’t.  I just used the word “jewelbox” – as well as pushing back against the manicured lawn this book also pushes back against certain sanitized versions of nature writing.  Can you talk about that?

Dungy: I don’t think it is safe, or sustainable or practical, to expect humans to only be able to commune truly and deeply with the greater than human world in isolation. I think it’s dangerous for us to expect that the only way to deep communion with the more than human world is to erase humans from that world.

And I think that danger is inscribed in American history.  It seems that frequently our “wild” spaces that have been revered as pristine and gorgeous and wonderful can only be so when humans have been erased from them. So if indigenous populations lived there, for millennia, that truth has to be erased for this pristine sublime landscape to appear worthy of that particular imagination of “the great nature.” That is catastrophic on many levels. Such erasures and diminishments are part of what I’m pushing against.

Taylor: And yet there’s a flipside to this, too—a way that we then erase diversity from our domesticated spaces, our lawns, our suburbs—a reverse orderliness as it were. And you see this on a lot of levels in the suburban landscape.

Dungy: Yes. I resist an American imagination that requires an erasure of people from a space in order for that space to be “wild” and therefore “natural” and wonderful, and I also note a converse kind of intense orderliness that we see in the type of chemically kept lawn that existed when we moved into this house.

The lawn was, of course, beautiful and green. But that meant that there was nothing else growing in that lawn but Kentucky bluegrass. Everything was regimented, homogenous, pretty much just one color. Then my Black family moves into the house and pushes for a diversity of what grew and was supported in that space.

So much of the American concept of beauty, order, respectability depends on a monochromatic, homogenous look that feels limiting and exclusionary. So I have been working in my particular neighborhood to open that up.

Taylor: Let’s talk about working at the border between poetry and essay. “Soil” contains essays and also some poems, too. Can you talk about how those things cross pollinate in your mind?

Dungy: I’m a writer. Writing is how I help myself make sense of the world. In “Soil,” I use both forms, as I used them at a kind of extreme moment in my life. Often I would have kept the poems for a separate book, but I wanted this book to be a an intimate set of revelations and offerings. I wanted this book to embrace the possibilities of a diversified imagination. There are also pictures of what’s in the garden and images of plant clippings. Rather than just a book of prose, “Soil” became a fuller experience of how I experienced this space at that time.

Taylor: What’s your advice to a first-time gardener, maybe somebody who’s just getting a plant or like a little plot?

Dungy: Have patience with yourself and with the plants. Remember that we live in a very, very lucky moment in information history. You can use the internet liberally to seek advice from people, particularly in your region, who can give you logical advice about how to tend these plants. My other advice is to remember that most plants grow, and they grow significantly larger than the size they are when you receive them. You need to make space for those plants to grow into their fullness. I think people often don’t do that, myself included, because it’s really hard to believe that a seed will become a three-by-three-foot bush. You need to be able to give those plants the space to become themselves.

Taylor: Supposing that you’re a first time or an emerging poet or writer, what’s the advice there?

Dungy: I feel like it’s the same advice.

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