Soil

The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

By: Camille T Dungy

Narrated by: 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.

Critic reviews

"In this quiet and far-ranging blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, poet Camille T. Dungy uses her small garden in Colorado to explore topics ranging from the isolation of parenting during Covid to the history of Black nature writing. Her narration, like her writing, is both careful and warm. In her prose and with her voice, she excels at drawing vivid pictures. It’s impossible not to feel like you’re right there with her, tending to native prairie grasses and harvesting baskets of colorful squash. This is a beautiful meditation on the complex web of human and nonhuman relationships that surround us, and a welcome addition to the growing canon of environmental literature that centers the knowledge and experiences of Black women."

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.

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!

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!

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.