Soil

The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

By: Camille T. Dungy

Narrated by: Camille T. Dungy

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism 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 predominately 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.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Like medicine...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the author's performance and the story felt like medicine to my soul. At times it was emotionally challenging for me as a black woman revisiting the past and present trauma Dungy conveyed. I too garden, I too am a mother, I too have faith in changing times for the better. Feeling seen and valued was a promising takeaway from SOIL. Thank you ✨

Thank You

I planted a garden the day before starting chemotherapy for breast cancer. I knew it was more than a garden. It’s flourishing now and the time I spend in reflection there felt crazy until I read this book. So many metaphors in the garden. So much teaching and learning. This is the most important book I’ve read this year.

Fact Checked

Fascinated by the detailed analogy of a Black mother’s garden to injustice, oppression, the inequity in these United States better known as racial discrimination.

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.

Beautifully written and read

I loved this book and am so glad I purchased the audio version to hear Ms. Dungy's engaging narration. I am not usually a fan of nature writing but am starting to enjoy it thanks to books like this one. It feels honest and truthful and acknowledges human connections with nature instead of trying to keep them separate. Ms. Dungy combines important and painful histories of racism and violence with soothing reflections on her garden and its restoration and experiences of her and her family. Her book takes me back to the height of the COVID pandemic in the best possible way.