From Lawns to Gardens

How one home owner’s yard transformation is intended to help to save the planet

Views of Roderick Ferguson’s front yard.  Photographs by the author.

I started the garden largely because of a devastating UN report about the precipitous decline of biodiversity.  The report made it clear that poisoning our oceans, soil and air was bringing plant, animal and human life to a precipice never seen in history. I thought cultivating a garden for pollinators would be a small way to help move the needle toward planetary recovery. 

I also was influenced by the story of DeWayne Johnson, the 46-year-old groundskeeper who had been awarded $256 million in a lawsuit against Monsanto in 2018, on the grounds that the company’s product Roundup had caused his incurable cancer. 

The lawsuit soon became personal when I asked my older brother about the origins of his cancer—cutaneous t-cell lymphoma, a cancer that has no precedent in our family. “Roundup,” he said very matter-of-factly. He had used the product to combat the weeds in his backyard, not knowing—unlike Monsanto—that it could end up wreaking havoc on his life.  So, in addition to the beauty and personal contentment that gardening can bring, I am keenly interested in working with plants to help correct a set of social and environmental ills and wrong doings.

In his own effort to recover ecological systems, the conservationist Douglas W. Tallamy argues that we cannot rely on national parks and forests within the U.S. to solve our ecological crisis since most of the land in this country is owned privately. Through his grassroots network Homegrown National Park, he aims to turn half of that landscape—the bulk of which exists as lawns—into ecosystems that can be used by plants, animals, and insects. If half of all lawns are repurposed and turned into “parks,” that would amount to more than 20 million acres or roughly ten Yellowstone National Parks.  Here, Tallamy is encouraging us to transform our properties into places with “ecological value,”  yards that work to support the natural world through sustainable design and native planting. Tallamy’s project is a way of connecting our yards to crises that are national and global in scale. It is also a means of enlisting our homes in collective efforts to address the planet’s dire present.  

As a teacher and scholar, I use the classroom and my writings as ways to get students and readers to see how areas that we presumed are disconnected are in fact intimately linked to one another. That has often meant helping people see the links between American sociology and the novels of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison; or the connections between queer people of color and issues of race, poverty, migration, gentrification, sexism, and liberation struggles. 

Gardening, a way to understand how various issues are entangled.

Gardening has become a way for me to understand how those issues are entangled in the climate and environmental crisis as well. The people most devastated by the debasement of the environment are the people least cared about in our world—people of color, the poor, migrant populations, and so on. In the United States,  communities of color get the lion’s share of environmental toxins and pollutants. In her report to the United Nations on how the “global ecological crisis is simultaneously a racial justice crisis,” the Zambian legal scholar E. Tendayi Achiume states, “global ‘sacrifice zones’ – regions rendered dangerous and even uninhabitable due to environmental degradation – are in effect, ‘racial and ethnic sacrifice zones’.”

Similarly, corporations’ devastation of the planet via fossil fuel 
emissions, chemical run-offs into waterways, oil tanker spills 
into the ocean, pipe line breaks, deforestation for timber,  
overproduction, waste dumping and depletion of underground 
aquifers is part of the same family of exploitations that brought 
patriarchy, racism, and colonialism into being. The grim reality is 
that our current environmental crisis is spawned by a long and 
interconnected history of exploitation.  

When I was a little boy, I was fascinated by the stories of my  great, 
great grandfather Grandpa Dan on my mother’s side. I can’t remember 
who it was that told me about this Muscogee-Creek man who made his 
living with plants. My Grandma Willie Mae and her sister Aunt Mattie filled 
my childhood and young adulthood with words like “root worker” and 
“medicine man.” Whether it was in Grandma’s kitchen in Manchester, 
Georgia or on the city bus in Philadelphia with Aunt Mattie, they both did 
their part to make a man whom I had never met feel real and present all 
the same.            

They make medicine only

In “Prescriptions of Root Doctors” in Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston describes the medical proficiency and community practice of southern root workers.

Folk medicine is practiced by a great number of persons. On the “jobs,” that is, in the sawmill camps, the turpentine stills, mining camps and among the lowly generally, doctors are not generally called to prescribe for  illnesses, certainly, nor for the social diseases. Nearly all of the conjure doctors practice “roots,” but some of the root doctors are not hoodoo doctors. One of these latter at Bogaloosa, Louisiana, and one at Bartow, Florida, enjoy a huge patronage. They make medicine only, and white and colored swarm about them claiming cures.

Social diseases?  Hurston seems to be referring to psychological conditions.                                 

They make medicine only. Successive generations of these medical practitioners developed a body of effective botanical knowledge that was practically wiped out during the great northern migration.

Grandpa Dan’s day in Meriwether County, GA, I imagine, sharecroppers, domestics, and maybe even a teacher or two would seek him out in search of some cure to address their ailments. As a child, I heard the grown folks talk about yellow root as a prescription for various complaints.  Yellow root, also known as golden seal (hydrastis canadensis), is native to North America.  The root was used by various indigenous groups and eventually native medicine and black folk medicine practices intermingled.  

Grandpa Dan must have used yellow root for gastritis and eye infections and that his clients were grateful for the instructions and advice he gave, their fingers cut from hours of picking the cotton. 

Chop the yellow root. 

The finer the better, and then simmer for twenty minutes. 

Let it sit until the water runs yellow. 

Yellow dock was another plant used in southern folk cultures.  The leaf stalks were used in salads; the root, as medicine for specific conditions. 
I envision my great-great grandfather doing what he could to meet the needs of the indigenous and black communities. 

When I first moved into my house, in the days when the front yard was just a lawn, I looked out the living room window and saw white butterflies trying in vain to find some plant that might nourish them. Today that front yard provides nourishment not only for butterflies but for dragonflies, worms, bees, goldfinches, and hummingbirds. Gardening is, for me, a way of supporting this community of little creatures as well. 

Roderick Ferguson is William Robertson Coe Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Professor of American Studies at Yale University.

Below: E. Tendayi Achiume addressing the U.N. General Assembly

Southeastern U.S. medicine person (Adobe visualization)