DIANNE D. GLAVE
‘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
“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.”1
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
396
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
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 postEmancipation South. These provide important insights into the relationship
between African Americans and the environment in the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-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
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
little about the relationship between gender, ethnicity, and gardening practices.4
Other historians have traced the geography of significant spaces, including
gardens, for southern African Americans. John Michael Vlach explores slave
spaces in his architectural interpretation of antebellum slavery in The Back of
the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Slaves re-contoured the
landscape, more than Euro-Americans understood, by the very placement and
types of slave buildings. Though Vlach only intimates this, yards as well as cabins
were significant spaces of meaning for slaves. Richard Westmacott looks more
carefully at the living spaces proximate to African cabins in African American
Gardens and Yards in the Rural South. He describes gardens as vital places and
spaces of survival, spirituality, subsistence, ornamentation, work, and leisure.
Vlach and Westmacott offer tantalizing glimpses of environmental perspectives
critical to this study.5
At the cross section of gender and labor in African American women’s history,
Jacqueline Jones argues that African American women and society defined their
roles in the gendered and separate spheres that were social commonplaces in
Victorian America. The African American community valued the productivity of
women, which reinforced their commitment to work in the home and garden.
Deborah Gray White, in Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South,
counters by saying that slave women and perhaps freed women were not passive
and proper Victorian women at home and work. Whether accepting or rejecting
Victorian mores, African American men and women worked together in
complementary roles that must be seen as viable family economic strategies
within the context of racism in the segregated South.6
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN GARDEN
AFRICAN AMERICAN and Euro-American gardens also possessed distinctive
characteristics much like the roles of African American men and women. Though
Vera Norwood argues that women of both groups were “responsible for designing
and maintaining the yard and its ornamental garden” according to gender,
ethnicity was as important as gender in shaping the unique gardens of African
Americans. These featured flowers, shrubs, trees, and plants that were purchased
individually, accepted as gifts, or cultivated from cuttings. African Americans
created colorful motifs from gifts and cast-offs. Euro-Americans could more
readily buy several plants and group and organize them. African Americans relied
on an oral tradition, unlike Euro-Americans whose expertise came from
magazines and books. African American traditions were so ingrained that plants
presented as gifts were associated with the giver.7
African American women manipulated and controlled their yards for multiple
functions in slavery and then in freedom. Free range in which livestock could
roam, or a pen, an extended kitchen from the house, cleaning and leisure spaces,
swept areas, and pathways to the fields, woods, the slaveholder’s house, and fenced
flower and vegetable gardens comprised overlapping spaces in the yard. Each
function, each space was often fluid with little or no boundaries. Unlike most
|
397
398
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
slaves, renters and owner-operators had some income and could purchase
livestock, including chickens and hogs that were given free range of the yard.
The women sought the shade and protection of trees from the sun and heat to
prepare meals, feed and entertain family and friends, scrape pots, scrub dishes,
wipe tables, beat rugs, and launder clothing. Children played and adults sought
recreation throughout the yard, particularly in the shade. Outside the green
spaces, women carefully swept clean any foliage, including weeds, creating a bare
and austere yard. The pathways took the women beyond their homes and yards to
the environs of the woods, fields, the big house, neighbors, and town.8
In these gardens, African American women planted vegetables, fruit, flowers,
shrubs, trees, and plants in red clay, sandy, and dark loamy soils. They generally
cultivated vegetable gardens on a side or to the back of the cabin for easy access.
To keep out livestock, their partners probably built enclosures of tied stakes for
gardens—less expensive than free range. Most women grew vegetable gardens
primarily to sustain their families. They planted okra, milo, eggplant, collards,
watermelon, white yam, peas, tomatoes, beans, squash, red peppers, onions,
cabbage, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Others planted truck gardens and sold corn,
cotton, peanuts, sweet potatoes, tobacco, indigo, watermelons, and gourds at the
market for profit. African Americans also displayed flowers for everyone’s viewing
and pleasure, beckoning neighbors to take a closer look or visitors to chat in the
yard’s fragrance and color. The women looked out upon exquisite flowers
including petunias, buttercups, verbenas, day lilies, cannas, chrysanthemums,
iris, and phlox planted in the ground, old tires, bottles, planters, and tubs. They
placed shrubs—roses, azaleas, altheas, forsythia, crepe myrtle, spirea, camellias,
nandina, and wild honeysuckle—throughout the yard. Azaleas and roses were most
commonly planted. The dogwood, oak, chestnut, pine, red maple, black locust,
sassafras, hickory, willow, cottonwood, and redbud dotted the landscape. They
chose ornamental plants that were self-propagating, along with annuals that were
generally self-seeding. Colorful combinations of blues, reds, pinks, oranges,
whites, and yellow often clashed with little or no sequencing. Placement was
generally informal, where the gardeners could find space. A mix of color and
placement resulted in a lack of symmetry and formal design. African Americans,
including the women, simply could not afford to buy several shrubs, plants or
flowers at the same time to create such symmetry.9
Women’s roles were transformed from slavery to sharecropping. Jacqueline
Jones observes that African American men reinforced gender roles by hunting
and fishing during slavery. Men were primarily responsible for cultivating the
tiny household garden plots allotted to families by the slaveholder. They practiced
conservation, tilling their own vegetable plots when time off from the
slaveholder’s tasks allowed. Dating back to the antebellum period, slaves used
organic farm methods such as composting, when they took or were given the
opportunity to grow their own gardens. A Louisiana slave gardener also built
birdhouses from hollowed gourds to attract nesting birds that protected
vegetables from insects and other pests. The birdhouses, a modern fixture in
suburban backyards, provided shelter for the birds that served as a natural pest
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
control. Though most slave women did hunt or fish, they certainly must have
assisted the men with the vegetable gardens planted primarily for family
consumption. Some women tended flowers—feminine work in which they
aesthetically enhanced and embellished their quarters with limited leisure time.
One slave vividly remembered the leafy plants and bright blossoms encircling
the family cabin: “Us live in a log house wid a little porch in front and de mornin’
glory vines use to climb ’bout it. When they bloom, de bees would come hummin’
’round and suck the honey out de blue bells on the vines. I members dat well
’nough, dat was a pleasant memory.’” Many women probably “dressed up” the
exterior of their homes with blossoms.10
After slavery, Glenda Gilmore argues, educated African American women
sought to establish partnerships with men “that maximized the potential and
efficiency of both members, and they tended to do that by avoiding hierarchical
ideas of male dominance and female subordination. Men and women were
different, but they had complementary work to do; once trained for that work,
women were anxious to establish domestic relationships that allowed them to
get on with the job.” Similarly, rural African American women and men cooperated
with one another, cultivating along gender lines: Men tended fields and women
kept gardens. African American men produced cash crops to support their families
after slavery was dismantled. Women expanded their roles by cultivating family
vegetable patches, continuing to plant ornamental and flower gardens. Gardens
served as a source of food for their families, a means of enhancing their homes,
and, in some circumstances, a small source of revenue. Women improved their
families’ nutrition by planting homegrown vegetables and saved money by
limiting the purchase of store goods. African American women supplemented
the pantry with turnip and collard greens, staples in their gardens. The women
also created visual appeal in the feminine domain with flowers and ornamental
plants outside their homes.11
GARDENING AND HOME DEMONSTRATION
THESE GARDENING traditions and the values of the women who practiced them
were illuminated by their contact with Progressive reform. Rural women were
reformers and the objects of reform, part of the national Progressive movement.
Though fragmented, Progressives shared core themes: opposing abuses by private
and government organizations, promoting social reform or justice, and
promulgating the gospel of scientific efficiency. Of the three, scientific efficiency
or the gospel of safe farming most influenced African American women who
gardened. Using agricultural and conservation methods, they applied Progressive
“principles of efficiency, scientific management, centralized control, and
organized economic development” in rural housekeeping. Across the country,
upper- and middle-class African American women formed their own Progressive
organizations like the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, along
with other local clubs. African American women served the community, pressuring
dairies to supply pasteurized milk for infants, building libraries, and supporting
homes for the elderly and orphans. In the South, Margaret Murray Washington
|
399
400
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
called the first Tuskegee Woman’s Club meeting in 1895, and club members
crossed social barriers to assist their poor sisters. Well-heeled women sought
upward mobility and entrée into exclusive social events. Club members also visited
local women to teach them to care for their homes, children, and ultimately the
community. Affluent African American women combined this elitism and service
and were often condescending to their poor rural counterparts.12
Rural African American women who were agents, teachers, students, and
housewives also gardened under the auspices of a broader Progressive
agricultural reform. The 1914 Smith-Lever Act created the Cooperative Extension
Work in Agriculture and Home Economics, a branch of the Federal Extension
Service, to promote the wise use of natural resources in forestry as well as in
farming, and to offer rural families training and information on topics from bee
keeping to women’s canning to boys’ pig clubs. The Extension Service persuaded
farmers and their families across the country to implement scientific
conservation methods such as turning under cover crops and applying fertilizers.
Cover crops included crimson clover, generally planted in the off-season to protect
the soil. The act ultimately included African Americans in these federally and
state funded agricultural programs. The agency directed money and resources to
white colleges catering to Euro-American farmers and creating a centralized
racially tiered administration, classes, and services in agriculture and home
economics. The agency assigned Cooperative Extension agents from the colleges
to other groups such as African Americans. Although these colleges provided the
central administration for the Cooperative Extension Service, individual agents
traveled from farm to farm, while others worked in experiment stations.13
Booker T. Washington launched the prototype of the Negro Cooperative
Extension Service at Tuskegee Institute. He reinforced the racial hierarchy of
the Progressive period by promoting separate education and unequal employment
in the trades and agriculture for African Americans. Sharing his vision with rural
farmers in Alabama, Washington encouraged them to improve their farming
methods. The Tuskegee Institute Movable School, which carted the latest farm
and household implements around the countryside on a horse-drawn carriage,
was used to demonstrate conservation techniques to local African American
farmers. On 12 November 1905, Tuskegee appointed Thomas Monroe Campbell
its first agent. Working with African American farmers, he traveled in the Movable
School truck, loaned farm implements, set up displays for safe farming, and
attempted to improve the health and homes of local sharecroppers and owneroperators. In ensuing years, Cooperative Extension agents like Campbell
expanded the program throughout the country.14
Women both represented and were served by the Home Demonstration Work
of the Negro Cooperative Extension Service. One hundred women worked as
agents for Home Demonstration in the South in 1923. These salaried employees
were selected and trained demonstrators who trained local women to improve
their homes and yards. African American women worked in one hundred counties
in eleven states, with approximately half in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and
Arkansas. The agents modeled household and family healthcare to local African
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
American women and girls in demonstration and club work. Agent Campbell
minimized some of the women’s duties: “During certain months of the year there
is little or no work for women. We urge upon every woman the raising of poultry
and consequently, the production of eggs, the making of butter, the pickling,
drying and canning of fruits, such as berries, plums, peaches, and apples, the
cultivating of a garden and raising of bees. Let her sell her produce to the best
advantage, reserving a portion for home use.” Campbell failed to acknowledge
that rural women’s work was labor intensive throughout the year.15
The vigor of their activity was demonstrated in other ways as well. African
American women completed 17,311 demonstrations in home beautification of
lawns and flower gardens in 1920. The Cooperative Extension Service also
documented that African American women cultivated 20,494 home vegetable
gardens across the country in that same year. They grew personal vegetable and
truck gardens, planted fruit trees and vines, and beautified their yard with flowers
and ornamental plants. Agents also performed some rural engineering by building
and remodeling homes and other buildings. Their engineering responsibilities
probably extended to terracing and horizontal plowing in larger gardens. The
women developed an expertise in gardening first in the community, and then
applied the Progressive scientific housekeeping principles of cleanliness,
thriftiness, and management of Home Demonstration work. The government
trained African American women to cultivate flowers, vegetables, trees, and
shrubs. Agents sponsored yard contests, provided training, and evaluated soil
conservation and aesthetics under the aegis of Negro Beautification of Grounds.
They sought to uplift lower-class African Americans by modeling home
improvement, particularly the exteriors of homes. One agent said “practically
every home has put forth some effort to have flowers around the place and much
beauty has been added in the country-side by these patches of color.”16
African Americans practiced two types of gardening that conflicted with and
paralleled Progressive agricultural techniques: mimicking nature and cultivating
the row system. Some gardeners reinforced African and African American
traditions in cosmology, an interpretation of the natural ordering of the universe
of wilderness, settled spaces, and crossroads. Slaves and sharecroppers, and even
members of the gardening clubs, created distinctively African American spaces
that simultaneously mimicked nature and rejected Euro-American control.
Though the gardens appeared chaotic, the chaos of plants also created a diversity
which reduced opportunities for weeds and pests to take hold. Some gardeners
sought ethical, moral, and spiritual enlightenment in these chaotic or wilderness
spaces in a way much like their African ancestors.17
Zora Neale Hurston fictionalized just such an early twentieth century yard
cared for by Missy May: “The front yard was parted in the middle by a sidewalk
from gate to door-step, a sidewalk edged on either side by quart bottles driven
neck down into the ground on a slant. A mess of homey flowers planted without a
plan but blooming cheerily from their helter-skelter place.” A Euro-American
novelist also fictionalized an urban African American woman in turn-of-thetwentieth-century Kansas who kept “a half-pleasing, half-offending jumble of
|
401
402
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
greenery and gleaming color, of bush and vine; of vegetable and blooming flower,
of kitchen ware, crockery, and defunct household furniture.” This novelist
disparagingly compared the yard to an African jungle, park, and dump. In Beaufort
and Wayne counties North Carolina, an agent similarly critiqued African
American women’s yards in a garden contest, concluding that the women kept
their yards in disarray out of poverty. Though not overtly racist, the agent’s
conclusion probably were based upon the racism of the period. Some observers,
including Progressive Home Demonstration agents did not know or care that
African and African American experience influenced some African American
gardeners.18
Yet other African Americans planted symmetrical gardens, which met the
goals of Progressive agricultural reform though they likely were rooted in older
row-crop traditions. African Americans applied their own understandings,
though, in their community appreciation of the “right way” for gardening. African
Americans valued doing things properly by applying the “‘right way’ of arranging
poles of beans, a ‘right way’ of building a potato bank.” Neighbors often competed
in a friendly fashion, doing it the “right way,” using a uniform design, aesthetics,
and old-fashioned labor. The North Carolina “Richmond County Yard Improvement
Contest” agents reinforced this approach: “Instead of trying to judge all of the
yards before and after they are planted, we decided to offer one point for every
shrubbery plant planted in a permanent place by next fall, but to encourage their
planting them in the right places. I have had demonstration in planting all over
the county and have particularly stressed foundation planting. All of the women
who are on the committee are interested in flowers and the majority of them have
well planted lawns ... This contest includes Euro-American and colored homes as
the colored yards detract from the view as much as the others. This will enable
every home to feel that they can make some effort to beautify their yard and
community.” Gardeners integrated Progressive gardening ideas with older
traditions within a context of community expectations about what was right and
what was not in the garden.19
African American women transplanted flowers, shrubs, and trees from the
surrounding woods into their yards, and used gardening styles both from the
community and from the repertoire of Progressive agricultural reform. Jacqueline
Jones documented an early-twentieth-century community tradition practiced by
African American women who dug up woodland flowers to permanently improve
their cabins. They transplanted azaleas, wild roses, honeysuckle, and dogwoods
in their yards. A Beaufort County agent praised poor African American women
who practiced frugality by collecting roots in the woods in Home Demonstration.
The agent also criticized the women’s homes before they “borrowed” plants from
local woods, imitating nature, to cover “unsightly porches.” Similarly, agents in
Wake County, North Carolina, sponsored a contest for thirty African American
and Euro-American participants who transplanted local shrubs and small trees
from the swamps to their yards, creating beautiful exteriors. Some planted long
leaf pines, including Lob Lolly, along with holly. They cultivated inexpensive native
shrubs, making their yards more attractive. Smaller plants included wax myrtle,
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
yucca, cedar, laurel, sumac, and poinsettia. According to another agent, women
doggedly scouted out plants, trees, shrubs, and flowers: “In some places I may
have made beggars of the women, in other places I have sent them into swamps
in crowds, but for it all I am sure, we will have a more beautiful county and a more
satisfied home-loving people.”20
African Americans also developed a garden aesthetic based on traditional and
Progressive influences. According to Richard Westmacott, women gardeners
cultivated flower patches for visual appeal: “The flower yard results from some
inner conviction to create something beautiful. ... The impression was that these
yards were gestures of graciousness in otherwise desperately hard lives.” Home
Demonstration agents contributed to this aesthetic by evaluating segregated
neighborhood yard improvements, with a focus on aesthetics, in the North
Carolina Forsythe Improvement Contest. The judges reviewed aesthetics,
emphasizing borders and foundations, and recommended that the women use
native shrubs, probably borrowed from the local woods. An agent observed that,
“Many walks were re-arranged, flower beds moved from lawns, lawns sowed in
grass, unsightly buildings removed, houses painted, steps repaired, shrubbery
grouped on corners and at entrances to grounds, and some terracing done.” The
agents encouraged African American women to make their homes and yards
beautiful by starting or continuing to plant flowers.21
The advances Progressive reformers believed they were introducing into
African American households also were integrated into long-practiced traditions
of conservation. Slaves composted oak leaves with fire ash and applied barnyard
manure and human waste to fertilize their gardens. African Americans continued
to use conservation techniques in the early twentieth century. In Alabama, Onnie
Lee Logan, an African American midwife, reminisced about her mother’s garden:
“We had three big gardens. String beans, butter beans, turnip greens, English
peas, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, okra, ever’thing. Tomatoes, three or four
different kinds of squash ... love, care, and share, that’s what we did. We had it
and my daddy and mother they shared with the ones that didn’t have it. Mother
would send a piece and share.” Her mother’s resourceful diversification of
vegetables made good gardening sense, and translated also into a sense of
community and social responsibility that was common among rural African
Americans. Lacey Gray from Longleaf, Louisiana, said her mother fed her healthy
food from the garden: “Mother never used pesticides or chemical fertilizers and
we never had problems with insects either. Used cow manure on big crops and
chicken manure on the kitchen garden.” Mary Lee from Shreveport, Louisiana,
reminisced about her mother who used laundry water to fertilize the vegetables
and herbs in her yard.22
Progressive reform efforts, conscious or not, joined or built on these traditions,
which included numerous examples of applications of conservation and
agricultural techniques in Home Demonstration gardening. In the Richmond
County Yard Improvement Contest, ten women’s and seven girl’s clubs competed
in home garden contests and continued to practice agricultural and conservation
techniques. One contestant, Sally Moore, an African American woman and club
|
403
404
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
president in the Hilly Branch, North Carolina, community, practiced
diversification and planted thirty-four different vegetables in what might have
been a truck farm garden, and produced a ten-pound head of cabbage. She probably
fertilized her garden with compost and manure. In demonstrations on how to
root plants, agents suggested the women ask one another for cuttings from plants,
a gardening method borrowed from agriculture. In addition, they evaluated the
efforts by the women in conservation and agricultural techniques in terracing
for drainage and maximizing space for planting, along with planting and
maintaining plants. They recommended that women use native grasses to protect
against wind and water erosion. Two other women of unknown ethnicity competed
for prizes. Mrs. Roscoe Johnson of Wake County won a $15 second prize for a
garden made with “good soil.” Mrs. Bryan Bizzell, a third place $10 winner,
resurrected the beauty of her old homestead by using grass, flowers, shrubs, and
other improvements to create “a lovely scene.” Other improvements might have
included water and erosion control, along with fertilizing techniques using nitrate
and manure, leaving fields fallow, and rotating crops, all based upon Progressive
scientific conservation and agricultural techniques—some already based on
traditional practices in the community.23
Participants in Home Demonstration took the initiative in planting their own
gardens and practicing conservation and agricultural methods outside these
competitions. Mrs. Clarence Vincent of Winterville diversified her North Carolina
vegetable garden in a way typical of African Americans and Euro-Americans. She
planted Irish and sweet potatoes, beans, and peas, which were stored and
consumed in winter. During the rest of the year she cultivated lettuce, radishes,
celery, carrots and cabbage, spinach, turnip greens, kale, collards, cabbage and
mustard, turnips, rutabagas, carrots and parsnips. She further diversified her
garden, mixing vegetables and fruits by planting collards, carrots, strawberries,
blackberries, and figs. Women in Beaufort County, North Carolina’s Home Gardens
Work also planted hotbeds and cold frames, and prepared the soil for “early and
successive planting and frequent cultivation of the tried and true vegetables along
with the introduction of a few new ones were stressed.” Mrs. W. H. Shavender,
another North Carolina woman, diversified and fertilized two plots: “I tried beans,
tomatoes, corn, beets, spinach, turnips, onions, pimentos, pepper and kale both
with and without nitrate of soda. My ground was prepared exactly the same for
both, same amount of stable manure, everything except the side dressing of
Nitrate of Soda on one and not on the other. The yield was more than double with
the soda and the plants and corn were not affected by the weather. The rows that
had soda application stayed green and kept bearing even after the other was gone,
especially so with beans. ... I never intended to plant anything in my garden again
without Nitrate of Soda. Last year I had lovely celery but this year it was killed
completely by drought. Nitrate of Soda gives such a wonderful start while plants
are young.” She also may have applied barnyard manure to restore soil fertility.
The women continued a tradition in gardening, influenced by the community and
the government.24
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
GARDENING IN AFRICAN AMERICAN SCHOOLS
AFRICAN AMERICAN gardening traditions also were bolstered and reinforced
by the education efforts initiated by the schools for African Americans that were
founded after the emancipation of slaves. Education was of premier importance
for freedmen and freedwomen, and they went to great lengths to encourage
opportunities for learning. African American women had their own interests, and
sought out more knowledge in gardening. They opened, supported, and attended
their own segregated schools, to reduce high illiteracy among African Americans
in the South. To promote and develop southern education after slavery, African
American women struggled against a substandard education system of
inadequate facilities, supplies, and teachers compared with Euro-American
schools across the nation. The teachers taught in one-room buildings, which often
were built for other purposes like sheltering livestock. A typical room was drafty
and chilly in winter and humid and sweltering in summer. Schools paid African
American teachers far less than their Euro-American counterparts, giving them
salaries as low as $1.60 a month. Women, the primary pool for secondary teachers,
generally lived on these subsistence wages, supplemented by room and board with
a local family. In addition, teachers foraged for school supplies including
chalkboards, books, pencils, and paper. W. E. B. DuBois described his own rural
teaching experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “There was an entrance
where a door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks
between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard
crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical
points, and my chair, borrowed from the land-lady, had to be returned every night.
Seats for the children—these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England
vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! The reality was rough plank
benches without backs, and at times without legs.”25
Education for southern African Americans came from a number of outside
sources, including northern philanthropists and societies, the Freedman’s Bureau,
and state governments. For example, northern reformers were eager to work in
partnership with southern freedmen and founded many of the first schools.
Yearning for autonomy and self-improvement, African Americans also practiced
self-help, hired and paid teachers, purchased building materials, and constructed
their own schools and campus facilities. When Reconstruction ended, African
Americans continued to improve and support education. State agricultural and
mechanical colleges, along with private institutions, also served the community,
offering longer and more extensive agricultural and home economic courses. The
schools offered full-time agricultural school programs, which translated into
education in the rural community, planned yard competitions, and home
demonstrations.26
African American schools offered several options to their students including
model yards and classes with practical and aesthetic applications. The school
trained students on school grounds by cultivating model yards for teaching and
profit. The model yards featured traditional elements found in a rural African
American culture, including gardens, livestock, and laundering. Schools like
|
405
406
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
Tuskegee and Hampton Institute also offered home economics classes, which
included gardening training for women, and an agricultural curriculum for men.
Most significantly, African American women teachers taught other women to
cultivate aesthetically pleasing gardens. Some applied their training to teach at
secondary schools. In 1937, the African American Elizabeth City State Normal
Summer School in North Carolina offered a class in housing titled, “The Rural
Community Background and Rural School Organization and Management,” which
emphasized home and yard aesthetics in the curriculum, and suggested “ways
and means of making rural life more attractive and joyous to those who live in
the open country.” Students sketched “attractive lawns and backyards and [gave]
suggestions of what native shrubbery to use and when to transplant it” in this
class. They created images of nature in their art and searched the woods for plants
to dig up, carry home, and replant.27
Progressive influences continued at Hampton which offered to African
American women courses with aesthetics in mind, ranging from “Flower
Arrangement” to “Landscape Design” in the “Curriculum for the Division of
Agriculture.” These courses nurtured creativity through symmetry and beauty.
Hampton also offered “Flower Arrangement” and “Flower Growing for Amateurs”—
classes focusing on aesthetics and scientific housekeeping already practiced in
the community and Home Demonstration. In the flower arranging class, teachers
taught “the fascinating art of flower arrangement [that] provides a medium of
expression universal in appeal. Students in all divisions of the Institute will find
value in learning to utilize plant materials in home, store, school, or office
decoration.” Instructors demonstrated “the necessary methods involved in
knowing and growing ornamental plants commonly used about the home can well
be learned with study and practice” in “Flower Growing.” As teachers, Home
Demonstration agents, or homemakers, women applied scientific housekeeping
to gardening.28
Hampton also offered classes in advanced gardening. Teachers there taught
“Ornamental Horticulture,” a course general enough in scope for the layperson
and the horticulturist. Students, both men and women, learned to arrange and
enhance “the homes and grounds and larger properties in order to make them
more useful as well as attractive” while “growing and caring for trees, shrubs,
and flowers as a commercial enterprise or as a hobby.” One of the courses,
“Landscape Design of Small Properties,” was more advanced than basic flower
planting and arranging, and taught vegetable gardening with an emphasis on
aesthetics: “Landscaping one’s own home or school grounds is an economy and a
pleasure as well as an art. Teachers, community workers, and home owners alike
will find it much to their advantage to be able to improve their surroundings in
their respective communities.” In the “Landscape Gardening” class, students
learned “the practical methods of beautifying grounds around the buildings, the
construction of wind breaks, placing ornamental flower beds, laying out walks,
planting trees and shrubs, arranging and planting window boxes.” Once again,
African Americans had the opportunity to layer Progressive horticultural
education upon community experiences.29
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
CONCLUSION
AFRICAN AMERICAN women were the creative sources of gardening in their
communities from slavery to the early twentieth century. By using yards in
different ways, women took possession of them. They manipulated and interpreted
the spaces for sustenance, comfort, joy, and sometimes profit. In the early
twentieth century, they effectively blended gardening techniques that had come
down from slavery and freedom with those taught by Home Demonstration agents
and at African American schools. To enhance their skills through Progressive
scientific housekeeping, women trained with and participated in garden clubs
through the federally funded Home Demonstration Service of the Cooperative
Extension Service and private southern African American schools. African
American schools like Hampton Institute complemented community and
Cooperative Extension experiences, and offered Progressive-era educational
opportunities ranging from flower arranging to garden landscaping. African
American wives, mothers, agents, community volunteers, and students created
gardens that were both new and old, with practices that integrated tradition with
Progressive practice.
Alice Walker reminisces about her mother, who planted a flower garden in
the 1930s and 1940s, just after this Progressive period: “I remember people coming
to my mother’s yard to be given cuttings from flowers; I hear again the praise
showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a
garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent
with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia—
perfect strangers and imperfect strangers—and ask to stand or walk among my
mother’s art. I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers
that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand
and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the
image of her personal conception of Beauty.”30
Other stories are waiting in the hands, arms, shoulders, and backs of these
rural African American women like Walker’s mother. More remains to be written
about African American women in gardening, and indeed, about the history of
rural African American interactions with the environment. How did African
traditions in gardening cross the Atlantic into the yards of slaves and then
sharecroppers? Did African American and Euro-American women differ in their
gardening traditions and techniques? Did wealthier African American women
tend more ornamental flower gardens and poorer women plant more food and
vegetable gardens? Was there any evidence of “lifting as we climb” in gardening
work, so pivotal in the African American women’s club movement? Were southern
gardening traditions transformed when African Americans migrated to cities like
Los Angeles and Detroit? How did African Americans create their communal and
personal urban and suburban gardens? Do any of those practices continue today,
and in what context do things grow for African Americans who engage in
gardening—this most fundamental interactions with nature?
|
407
408
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
D.. Gl
Gla
Dianne D
av e is an assistant professor in the African American Studies
Department at Loyola Marymount University, and an African American and
environmental historian. She is co-editing a collection of essays with Mark Stoll
titled ‘To Love the Wind and the Rain’: Essays in African American Environmental
History, which is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
NOTES
I would like to thank Carolyn Merchant who urged me to submit this article to
Environmental History. I also appreciate Mart Stewart, Adam Rome, and the
anonymous readers of the journal for their comments on earlier drafts of this
article.
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1967; reprint, San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich 1983), 243.
2. For Progressives in the South, see Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life
After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kevin Gaines,
Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and C. Vann Woodward, Origins
of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1971). For Progressive education, see Lawrence Arthur Cremin, The
Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New
York: Knopf, 1961); and David B. Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue:
Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). For
southern education, see James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self,
and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996). For African American education, see James D. Anderson, The Education
of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1988); Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to
the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); V. P. Franklin and
James D. Anderson, New Perspectives on Black Educational History (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1978); and Meyer Weinberg, A Chance to Learn: A History of Race and Education in
the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). For African American
women in the Progressive period, see Floris Cash, “Womanhood of Protest: The Club
Movement Among Black Women, 1892-1922,” (Ph.D., diss. State University of New York
at Stony Brook, 1986); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black
Women on Sex and Race in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Glenda
Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement
in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993); Maude T. Jenkins, “The History of the Black Women’s Club Movement in
America” (Ed.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 1984); Ruby M. Kendrick, “‘They Also
Serve’: The National Association of Colored Women, Inc.” The Negro History Bulletin
XVII (March 1954), 171-75; Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women of the
South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1989); and Jacqueline Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).
1.
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
3. Thomas Monroe Campbell, The Movable School Goes to the Negro Farmer (Tuskegee,
Ala.: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1936), 86.
4. For southern environmental history, see Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An
Environmental History, rev. ed. (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1996); Mart
A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia
Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Pete Daniel, Breaking
the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Cowdrey establishes southern
environmental history in This Land, This South, a sweeping survey from 475 million
years ago to the 1990s. He correctly points to the importance of the lucrative row crop
system as vital to an understanding of the environmental history of rural African
Americans who labored in the fields. Cowdrey invites environmental historians to draw
on his broad interpretation to develop case studies of particular places and peoples in
the South. Stewart’s regional “What Nature Suffers to Groe” identifies the importance
of different traditions of environmental relations among blacks and whites, and how
these evolved into or were expressed by fundamentally different landscapes, even when
they looked almost the same and were in the same place. These traditions had a history
of both continuity and change in the nineteenth-century South, and historians, Stewart
argues, must look closely at the practices of everyday life to identify their significant
contours. He also emphasizes the relationship between labor and landscape, as the
title of his book suggests. Daniel looks at the three crop monocultures and how African
Americans functioned within them as these monocultures changed and resisted or
lurched toward modernization after Emancipation.
5. For African American women in gardening, see Marie Campbell, Folks Do Get Born
(1946; reprint, New York: Garland Publishers, 1984); Zora Neale Hurston, “The Gilded
Six Bits,” in The Norton Anthology: African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (1933, reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997); 101119; Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women
and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
and Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. For African Americans in gardening,
see Grey Gundaker, “African-American History, Cosmology, and the Moral Universe of
Edward Houston’s Yard,” Journal of Garden History 14 (1994): 179-205; Grey Gundaker,
ed. Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Tom Hatley, “Tending Our
Gardens,” Southern Changes 6, no. 5 (July/August 1984): 18-24; Elise Eugenia Lemaistre,
“In Search of a Garden: African Americans and the Land in Piedmont Georgia,” (A.B.
Thesis, Masters of Landscape Architecture, Princeton University, 1981); John Michael
Vlach, The Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Richard Westmacott, African-American
Gardens and Yards in the Rural South (Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1992);
Richard Westmacott, “Pattern and Practice in Traditional African American Gardens
in Rural Georgia,” Landscape Journal 10 (Fall 1991), 86-104; and Richard Westmacott,
“Yards and Gardens of Rural African Americans as Vernacular Art,” Southern Quarterly
32 (Summer 1994): 45-63. For southern gardening, see James C. Bonner, “Houses and
Landscape Design in the Antebellum South,” Landscape 21(1977): 2-8; and Merle Prunty,
Jr. “The Renaissance of the Southern Plantation,” Geographical Review, 45 (October
1955): 459-91. For women in gardening, see Benay Blend, “‘I am ... the Very Heart of
Wildness’: Caroline Dormon, Naturist and Preservation Activist,” Southern Quarterly
35 (Fall 1996): 69-74; Jennifer Bennett, Lilies of the Hearth: The Relationship Between
Women and Plants (Camden East, Ontario: Camden House Publishers, 1991); Evelyn
Nakano Glenn, “The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and
|
409
410
|
E N V I R O N M E N T A L H I S T O R Y 8 ( J U LY 2 0 0 3 )
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Domestic Work, 1905-1940,” Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. History
Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1990); Raquel Rubio
Goldsmith, “Seasons, Seeds, and Souls: Mexican Women Gardening in the American
Mesilla, 1900-1940,” in Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990: Creating
Spaces, Shaping Transitions ed., Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984); Deborah Nevins, “The Triumph of Flora:
Women and the American Landscape, 1890-1935,” Magazine Antiques 127, no. 4 (1985):
904-22; Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Beverly Seaton, “Gardening Books for
the Commuter’s Wife, 1900-1937,” Landscape 28, no. 2 (1985): 41-47; Jean Troy-Smith,
Called to Healing: Reflections on the Power of Earth’s Stories on Women’s Lives (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1996); and Marilyn Ziebarth, “On Gardening,”
Minnesota History 53 (Summer 1992): 70-79.
For the gender roles of African American women, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to Present (New
York: Vintage Books, 1985), 3; Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal
Slave Economies of Low Country Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995),
41-42; and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), 22, 155.
Norwood, Made from This Earth, 136; Westmacott, African-American Gardens and
Yards, 108.
Lemaistre, “In Search of a Garden,” 37-55; Westmacott, African-American Gardens and
Yards, 33-112.
Lemaistre, “In Search of a Garden,” 37-55; Westmacott, African-American Gardens
and Yards, 33-112; Hatley, “Tending Our Gardens,” 19.
Jones, Labor of Love, 36; Lewis W. Jones, “The South’s Negro Farm Agent,” Journal of
Negro History XXII (Winter 1953), 43; Vlach, Back of the Big House, 166.
Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Jones, Labor of Love, 88; Westmacott, “Yards and
Gardens,” 55; and Westmacott, African American Gardens and Yards.
Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American
Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1993), 24.
As early as 1906 and prior to the Smith-Lever Act, African Americans had limited access
to Cooperative Demonstration Work. See Roy V. Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise
of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 232; and
Wayne D. Rasmussen, ed., “Smith Lever Act, 1914,” Agriculture in the United States: A
Documentary History, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1975), 1384. For the Cooperative
Extension Service, see Paul D. Warner and James A. Christendon, The Cooperative
Extension Service: A National Assessment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); L. R.
Simons, Early Development of Cooperative Extension Work in Agriculture and Home
Economics in the United States (New York: New York State College of Agriculture, 1963);
and John Alexander McMahon, Cooperative Extension Work in North Carolina (Chapel
Hill: Institute of Government, University of North Carolina, February 1955). For the
Negro Cooperative Extension Service, see Campbell, The Movable School; Earl W.
Crosby, “Building the Country Home: The Black County Agent System, 1906-1940,”
(Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 1977); J. A. Evans, Extension Work Among Negroes:
Conducted by Negro Agents, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department Circular 355
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923); Carmen V. Harris, “Blacks in
Agricultural Extension in South Carolina,” (M. A. Thesis, Clemson University, 1990);
Jones, “The South’s Negro Farm Agent,” 241-52; W. B. Mercier, Extension Work Among
Negroes, 1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921); “The Smith-Lever
Act: Progress of Extension Work in Agriculture and Home Economics During the First
A GARDEN SO BRILLIANT
Year,” The Negro Farmer, 9 Octobee 1915.
14. Jones, Labor of Love, 38-39.
15. Campbell The Movable School 86; Evans, Extension Work Among Negroes, 5, 15-16.
16. Evans, Extension Work Among Negroes, 16; Mercier, Extension Work Among Negroes,
16 and 15. Jean S. McKimmon, North Carolina Home Demonstration Work Annual
Report, Private Collection, Jane S. McKimmon Papers, 1910-1945, 1928, PC 234.3, North
Carolina State Archives (hereafter NCSA).
17. Gundaker“African-American History,” 192, 197, 199; Hatley, “Tending Our Gardens,”
18-19.
18. Hurston, “The Gilded Six Bits,” 1011; Vlach, Back of the Big House, 14; Gundaker,
“African-American History, Cosmology, and the Moral Universe of Edward Houston’s
Yard“ 179; McKimmon, NCSA.
19. Westmacott, “Yards and Gardens,” 54; McKimmon, NCSA; Westmacott, “Yards and
Gardens,” 55.
20. McKimmon, NCSA; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, 86; Westmacott, African-American
Gardens and Yards, 83.
21. Westmacott, “Yards and Gardens,” 54 and 55; McKimmon, NCSA.
22. Lemaistre, “In Search of a Garden,” 43; Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 139-40;
Westmacott, “Yards and Gardens,” 54.
23. McKimmon, NCSA.
24. Ibid.
25. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1988); Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventures in Giving: The Story of the
General Education Board, A Foundation Established by John D. Rockefeller (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), 2-3; W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New
York: Signet Classic, 1982), 99.
26. Foner, Reconstruction, 97; Evans, Extension Work Among Negroes, 22-23; and Mercier,
Extension Work Among Negroes, 19.
27. “Rural Education Courses in the Elizabeth City State Normal Summer School, 1936,”
NC 236.4, Summer Schools Reports, General Education Board (GEB), Rockefeller
Archive Center (RAC).
28. “Division of Agriculture,” Hampton Institute Pamphlets, VA 38, Hampton Institute,
GEB, RAC and “Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School, Agricultural Department, Part
I, Organization and Courses of Study” and Hampton Institute Pamphlets, VA 38,
Hampton Institute, GEB, RAC.
29. “Division of Agriculture” and “Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School, Agricultural
Department, Part I, Organization and Courses of Study” and Hampton Institute
Pamphlets, VA 38, Hampton Institute, GEB, RAC.
30. Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 241.
|
411