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I am an indoorsy person who has nevertheless fallen in love with nature writing. It started with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which detailed a year in the author’s life of living off the land. I ate up her descriptions of seed packets and seasonal planting despite the fact that, in my own home, I am known to have a black thumb.
My love only intensified with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a memoir about living in reciprocity with the land and with each other. I loved it so much that I read it twice, followed by a number of other outdoorsy reads.
As much as I admired the authors and their dedication to honoring the land, I felt apart from them. I knew I would never be able to walk the trails near my home without being terrified of wasps… would never be able cultivate a bountiful herb garden without my husband’s help… would never be able to keep the spider plants in the herb window alive when he went out of town.
I could only ever admire what nature had to offer at a remove.
Then I read Camille T. Dungy’s Soil.
I won’t say my capabilities align with Dungy’s. Her abilities when it comes to gardening surpass my own. But when I read her memoir about cultivating a diverse garden in her own yard, I knew I was observing someone who did not have the luxury of spending all their time in nature, developing a connection to the land, allowing it to become a thing that came easy because of their complete immersion in it.
Dungy acknowledges this, allowing her book to be in conversation other titles in the realm of nature writing, pointing out how the genre has historically not been welcoming to women, to mothers, to Black people. The genre has effectively erased them.
But that’s not the only thing that sets this book apart from others. In addition to making all the pieces of her life visible, Dungy is also clearly writing about more than just her connection to the land.
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Dungy writes about pushing back against the uniformity inherent in the trim, green lawns that surround so many of our homes. She chooses instead to cultivate a pollinator garden filled with a wide variety of flowers, herbs, vegetables, and other plants, a choice that flies in the face of her community guidelines.
But her garden also stands as a metaphor for homogeneity in other forms. In asking why we value some plants over others, for example — why we will pull a dandelion but nurture a daisy — she is also asking why there are people we would rather not see and people we would rather not take the time to know more about, instead cultivating an environment where we only ever see what we recognize.
At the beginning of Dungy’s book, there is a scene where her husband-to-be mistakes a seagull for a duck. Instead of judging him, she writes, “I realized in that moment how much I, also, do not know. About myself. About the world around me. How much I take for granted about the language I use to describe the world, and how much I could miss out on as a result of what I didn’t work to learn.”
Dungy’s book makes me want to learn everything I do not know. It’s the perfect read for coming into the season of nature’s rebirth and beyond.
