A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design': Rural African American women, gardening, progressive reform, and the foundation of an African American environmental perspective

Environmental History, Jul 2003 by Glave, Dianne D

"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength-in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."'

Alice Walker, In Search of our Mother's Gardens, 1967

TO PLANT their flower and vegetable gardens, African American women used their hands-darkly creviced or smoothly freckled; their arms-some wiry, others muscled; and their shoulders and backs-one broad and another thin. They dropped small seeds into the soil with their veined hands. They wrapped their arms around freshly cut flowers to decorate tables in their homes. They bent their shoulders and backs to compost hay, manure, and field stubble, and transplanted plants from the woods into their own yards. These women developed a unique set of perspectives on the environment by way of the gardens they grew as slaves and then as freedwomen. They continued these practices and exercised these perspectives into the early twentieth century. Rural African American women then joined these traditional ways of gardening with horticultural practices they learned from Home Demonstration Service agents and from the special programs developed in African American schools in the South.

An examination of these traditions and practices of gardening changes the reading scholars have had of African American participation in Progressive-era agricultural reform and also reveals the outlines of a rural African American environmental perspective at the time. Progressives envisioned national agricultural reforms that subjugated the discrete and nuanced expertise of local actors to models of bureaucratic efficiency and skill. Yet African American women developed an expertise from community knowledge, from their own interpretations of agricultural reforms, and from the training they received in horticulture in the Cooperative Extension Service, African American schools and other places. Progressive era scholars have missed the critical role of African American women gardeners in Progressive reform efforts, or at least have not viewed the participation of African Americans in these efforts through the critical lens of gender.2

These women cultivated with simple tools, a hoe, trowel, or shovel in one hand and seeds or fertilizer in the other hand. But they gardened within a gendered and racial milieu that gave the application of these simple instruments of skill a complex social potency. Rural African American women and men often supported one another in complementary roles and with strategies that were designed to support the family unit. Some women met their own and sometimes their family's needs by harvesting vegetables for meals, and by planting shrubs and cultivating flowers to create more appealing homes.

The value of the women's contributions to household productivity was often invisible to Progressive reformers, who practiced enormous condescension in their efforts to uplift the poor. African American reformers shared this condescension, making women special objects of disdain. Thomas Monroe Campbell, an agent for the Negro Cooperative Service, was haughtily dismissive of rural women, characterizing them as "too careless as to the loud manner in which they act in the streets and in public places ... and unduly familiar with men." But ultimately, African American women in the rural South controlled how and where they gardened, and by implication, why they gardened. They drew upon rich traditions of gardening knowledge and took what they would from Home Demonstration Work and the education programs of African American schools. This article explores this relationship between African American gardening and Progressive reform, but also asks how African American women cultivated their own gardens. Were African American women's gardens expressions of self-interest or community experience and values, or both? Did the women blend community and Progressive influences in the gardens they made and used? How did the gardening practices of African American women in the early twentieth century rural South add up to an environmental ethic?3

Scholars of environmental history have yet to say much specifically about African American gardening practices. Yet southern environmental history, a scholarship in infancy, provides some useful context for understanding the experiences of these African American women. A lacunae about gardening also exists in this scholarship. The useful works in developing a context for understanding southern gardening traditions include Albert Cowdrey's comprehensive environmental history of the American South, Mart Stewart's work on the landscapes of slaves and masters in the tidewater South, and Pete Daniel's study of the evolution of the sharecropping system in the post-Emancipation South. These provide important insights into the relationship between African Americans and the environment in the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century South. But except for an analysis of the landscapes that emerged from the creative subsistence practices of slaves and a section on the gardening practices of plantation mistresses in Stewart's book, these studies say little about the relationship between gender, ethnicity, and gardening practices.4