THE final line of Lucille Clifton’s poem “Mulberry Fields”—“bloom how you must i say”—serves as a fitting epigraph to Camille T. Dungy’s new book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, published by Simon & Schuster in May. At once invitation and imperative, those six words predict the book’s narrative arc and embody the multiplicity of Dungy herself as poet, activist, mother, sister, historian, and gardener. They also beckon readers to come along on this journey where, as she writes, “Gardens, history, and hope are the same. Though once dearly beloved, if left untended, without anyone’s dedication and care, much will be totally lost.” Tending her own garden outside her home in Fort Collins, Colorado, as well as a far wider literary and cultural landscape, Dungy proves a trustworthy steward.
In the ten years that she, her husband, Ray, and their daughter, Callie, have lived in Fort Collins, where she is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy has bloomed as both gardener and writer. The seed of her interest in the natural world may have been planted by her father, Dr. Claibourne Dungy, a pediatrician by education and training as well as a gardener, she says, “because it brought him joy.” While she has kept house-plants since her first apartment in Greensboro, when she was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, her current home marks the first time she’s had the land and the intention to stay long enough to watch a garden grow into maturity. The space is only two-fifths of an acre, which includes the house, but it’s enough. “My husband is from New York City, and we moved here from the Bay Area,” she says, “so taking care of an acre of land was unfathomable to him and exhausting-sounding to me. I can do a lot with this space.”
And she has. The frontispiece of is a map of the yard as it appeared when Dungy and her family moved in, the back page a map of her current garden. “It doesn’t feel like I’ve made some overwhelming accomplishment,” she says, “but when I saw the maps, I thought, ‘Holy cow! I have done a lot.’” To her, though, it seems a more gradual change, one step forward, two steps back, and there’s always more to be done—also true about writing. For her they intersect: “That’s why I like to garden while I’m
