Cover ArtDungy, a CSU professor and poet, writes about the flower garden and native prairie space at her home in Fort Collins. Dungy, who is African American, shares stories along with the scientific names of her plants. A chapter might begin with rabbits living in her yard, then shift to the history of how plants and seeds arrived with Africans who survived the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery. She weaves modern events with family history and historical research about the United States.
 
Publisher’s description
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.

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