Soil

The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

De: Camille T. Dungy

Narrado por: Camille T. Dungy

A “heartfelt and thoroughly enriching” (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders) work that expands on how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

“Brilliant and beautiful” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights), Soil functions as the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the people of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

©2023 Camille T. Dungy. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Sowing seeds of beauty and racial justice

I love this book! Her writing is colorful, thoughtful, and beautiful. I love that she mentioned books I have read like Braiding Sweetgrass, and areas I have seen! I love that she includes her child in the story and the many animals and plants in her yard. It makes a wonder soil in which to hopefully bury her despair and plant her seeds of hope for racial justice!

What a beautiful story.

The author beautifully weaves together her story to “our” story, the past the present and the future and makes me want to tend to my garden and my story.

For every human to read

Connecting everyday life to the garden. Dungy wrote for all living beings who cultivate the land and for those who adore the land.

I was sad when it was over

Fantastic book and very well read by the author. I liked the bits of both environmental facts and black history sprinkled throughout since I am my white, maniacal gardener and mother-in-law to a black daughter-in-law.

Her growing knowledge of gardening for wildlfe

Both poignant for her life and ancestral history as a Black American and learning to garden in Northern Colorado.

Beautifully Written and Read!

This book intertwines life and its struggles with the truths the author discovers in her gardening and working in her yard. Although this book is prose, the author's use of words rings poetic in my ears. Listening to this book challenges me in my own gardening and life. I highly recommend it.

How 1 part of her life ties to another part.

I very much enjoyed learning the back storys of various things and how they intersect with others across time and space

So good!

Gorgeous intersectional rendering of nature and our place within it. Intrepid yet accessible; lyrical and well researched. I could listen to Camille Dungy read all day every day!

Educational

A frightening and damming history of America. Reality is not pretty but is necessary. Now more than ever.

Really beautiful book about gardening

Wonderful memoir, read really beautifully by the author, about a Black gardener cultivating a garden in white suburban Colorado during the pandemic.

I appreciated that the book isn’t so much about self-sufficiency and vegetable gardening and “living off the land,” but about the sheer beauty of flowers and the joy of growing things.

Dungy launches a “prairie project” in her backyard, working to restore a diverse and heterogenous and drought-tolerant ecosystem in the middle of suburbia——while at the some time not being overly finicky or a purist about only selecting native plants.

The book doubles as a history of nature writing——with a critique of the way that so much canonical environmental literature focuses on solitary men in the wilderness. This is a book about struggling to find time to garden (and to write about gardening) while caring for a family and holding down a job. And in that sense, it’s the perfect audiobook to listen to while trying to find time in the garden, caring for a family, and holding down a job.

The book brims with further reading recommendations and has a compelling list of heroes (both gardeners and nature writers), from the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer to Willa Cather to Pam Houston, and I found myself also scribbling down plant recommendations too——I ordered some bright orange Mexican sunflower seeds before finishing the book.