Documenting Black Women's Gardens as Living Archives

A few years ago, I led a community garden in the Black historic community of Acres Homes in Houston and joined a Black Women gardening club as well.  Through fellowshipping and building community with gardening at the center, I began to question what relationships and memories do these women have with their garden because of their commitment and passion for it. I knew their roots traveled deep, but how deep.

Read: How I Started Working At A Community Garden

That question led me to start Growing Home: Where Memory Takes Root, documenting the stories Black women hold within their gardens. Viewing their gardens as living archives that hold inherited identity, land memory, and indescribable love.

Black women have worked the land for GENERATIONS through forced labor, a means of survival and a force of resistance. Today these women are carrying ancestral knowledge and memories subconsciously as their gardens. Today their gardens are an escape beyond the doors they leave to enter a sacred space unto themselves, a portal.

This project is personal, as a gardener and steward of the land. Gardening is an outlet for me to be connected and rooted with nature as a student.