1/23/2024 0 Comments Garden story play time![]() ![]() Rather than tromping far away in solitude in search of some elusive connection with nature, Dungy focuses her attention very close to home. One bonus of turning lawn into garden: no more mowing! "Just one guy – so often a guy – with no evidence of family or anyone to worry about but himself." "The (nearly always white) men and women who claim to be models for how to truly experience the natural world always seemed to do so in solitude," she writes. There is, she writes, "a pattern in nature writing that confounds and annoys me." Dungy mentions writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Edward Abbey, as well as Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver. In Soil, Dungy draws a connection between diversifying the plant life in her garden and diversifying the canon of nature writing. (Her solution? Plant much more of everything.) "I was lucky," she says, "in having moved to a town that created a space for that embrace."ĭungy's garden, in its glorious variety, attracts bees, butterflies, and all kinds of birds – goldfinches, pine siskins, nuthatches, chickadees – as well as mountain cottontail rabbits who nibble on her plants. ![]() Now, those rules against "non-standard landscaping" have been eliminated: Fort Collins currently has an active initiative to encourage diversification of the landscape. "In those early years," Dungy writes in Soil, "a woman walked around the neighborhood with a ruler, measuring too-tall grass and what she considered unwieldy or weedy vegetation, reporting homeowners to the HOA board for review and possible censure."ĭungy believes building a sustainable world is not a solitary pursuit. The local homeowners' association had a strict yard maintenance code that forbade anything that upset the homogeneous look of the neighborhood. Such a wild, unmanicured garden was verboten in 2013, when Dungy first moved to Fort Collins with her husband and young daughter. So right now we have a very blonde garden!" They stay up "to create winter interest," she says, "but also a lot of the native pollinators will nest or plant their eggs and larvae under and around many of these native plants. She leads me on a tour of what she calls her backyard "prairie project," which she's filled with native grasses like blue grama and little bluestem, and with perennials that will flower later in the spring: penstemon, bee balm, baptisia, echinacea, Lewis flax.ĭungy shows me the tall dried grasses that she's left standing from last season, along with the dead stalks from her milkweed and sunflowers. Because Dungy lives at altitude, her garden is a couple of months behind mine and her plantings still mostly dormant. When we talk, my garden is bursting with bloom, with beds of deep purple columbine, hot pink and lavender phlox, spiky white foamflower. Hot pink moss phlox spills over a stone wall. On a recent morning, we connect by Facetime video for a long-distance, D.C.-to-Colorado, garden-to-garden tour. lawn with all sorts of native perennials, friendly to pollinators. Like her, I've done away with sod and replaced our D.C. It took countless hours of backbreaking work: clearing her garden beds of hundreds of pounds of rock, amending the soil with compost and mulch, and turning the soil with shovel and pitchfork until she was drenched with sweat.ĭungy and I have been on similar garden journeys. In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, Dungy describes her years-long project to transform her weed-filled, water-hogging, monochromatic lawn in suburban Fort Collins, Colo., into a pollinator's paradise, packed instead with vibrant, drought-tolerant native plants. ![]() And for sure, Dungy can be counted among those who do exactly that. "I love a person who talks kindly to plants," poet Camille Dungy writes in her new contemplative memoir. Camille Dungy leaves the dead stalks of her sunflowers standing for winter interest and the occasional bird visitor. ![]()
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