Dirt and Dignity: The Power of Gardens, Seeds and Place

Community members from across the region gathered for Berkshire Botanical Garden’s 10th annual Rooted in Place Ecological Symposium at Berkshire Waldorf High School in Stockbridge on Sunday, Nov. 9.

Through talks, a documentary screening and a panel on food sovereignty, the day explored how land, culture and biodiversity intersect. But the symposium was about more than gardening: It was about reclaiming uprooted histories, building community and planting hope for future generations.

‘The Land Is Not the Criminal — Just the Scene of the Crime’

Horticulturist and garden historian Abra Lee opened the day with a keynote drawn from her forthcoming book, “Conquer the Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers” (Timber Press).

Lee explored the deep legacy of Black gardeners and horticulturists, emphasizing their vital roles in ecology and cultural preservation.

Drawing from the lives of figures such as George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, William Lanier Hunt, Asa Sims, and Effie Lee Newsome, Lee illuminated how generations of Black Americans cultivated both land and beauty under challenging circumstances. These individuals, she explained, were educators, innovators and storytellers who found resilience through their connection to the soil.

Lee reflected on Hunt’s poignant observation that “the land is not the criminal — just the scene of the crime,” underscoring how the land itself remains a site of healing, memory and reclamation. She described a traditional Black rural garden, often a “half pleasing, half offending jumble” of flowers and vegetables, as an intentional expression of creativity, logic and love, where beauty and sustenance coexist “democratically.” In these gardens, marigolds bloomed in butter kits and geraniums glowed in punctured dishpans, symbolizing resourcefulness and pride.

In a world still marred by injustice and conflict, Lee urged her audience to remember that “we must overbalance ugliness with beauty.” This beauty, she said, is not superficial. Rather, it is ecological, cultural and moral. She framed her own work as “telling love stories for a living,” honoring those who devoted their lives to the land and to uplifting others.

Lee closed with a call for participants to find their own “common ground,” to use their voices and passions to nurture connection, biodiversity and hope. “We’re having a renaissance in our own presence,” she reminded the audience, inviting them to see land stewardship as an act of art, resistance to the status quo and renewal.

Seeds as Living Memory

K Greene, co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Company and director of Seeds and Engagement at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, invited the audience into a different form of reflection.

Greene had each audience member choose a seed from a bowl. Greene then began by asking everyone to hold the seed between their fingers. “Close your eyes,” Greene said. “Feel its shape, its texture, its weight.” For a moment, the room fell silent. “This,” Greene continued, “is a living potential. Each seed carries a story.”

Quoting artist Paul Cézanne — “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution” — Greene suggested that close, artful observation can spark new ways of seeing and profound transformation. Greene posed a central question that has guided their 25 years of work: “What is a seed?”

Greene noted that while science defines seeds biologically, other perspectives reveal their multiple meanings. Corporate agriculture, represented by companies like agricultural behemoth Monsanto, treat seeds as technological tools for productivity and profit. By contrast, thinkers such as Cary Fowler emphasize seeds as vital genetic resources for human survival, while Indigenous seed keepers and activists like Rowan White, Vandana Shiva and Mary Arquette understand seeds as living ancestors, spiritual relatives and carriers of cultural memory. These differing worldviews shape how humanity relates to seeds and to the land itself.

Greene highlighted the crisis of agrobiodiversity, noting that a few multinational corporations now control more than 80 percent of global seed resources, resulting in immense genetic loss. Yet Greene expressed optimism: This loss is reversible through community-level seed saving, local breeding and cultural storytelling.

Describing the work of the Hudson Valley Seed Company, Greene explained its founding vision: “Seed is a story.” Each seed packet in the company’s “Art of the Seed” collection features an original artwork created to illuminate the unique cultural and horticultural story of that variety. Greene has avoided using photography for the packets because they wanted them to convey seeds as living, evolving masterpieces of nature, not as static “products.” Each packet’s artwork, created by a different artist, mirrors the diversity of the seeds themselves.

Greene illustrated this idea with the story of an ancient squash species once eaten (and dispersed through their feces) by megafauna such as mastodons. After those animals went extinct, the plant eventually evolved new relationships with humans, an example of coevolution and interdependence. The seed packet artwork depicting tiny mastodons among squash vines and a set of human hands symbolizes this long, interconnected history of past, present and future life.

Throughout his talk, Greene emphasized seeds as vehicles of transformation and continuity. They hold memory, adapt to change and embody relationships across generations. Greene closed with a call to action: Every person can help reverse the loss of diversity by growing endangered varieties, saving and sharing seeds and creating local seed libraries. In doing so, we keep alive not only plants, but the many intertwined stories of culture, place and resilience that seeds contain.

Gardens as Acts of Resistance

Greene was followed by Kevin West, who has recently settled in the Berkshires. When West talks about gardens, he isn’t just talking about vegetables. The East Tennessee native, writer, preserver of food traditions, and author of “The Cook’s Garden” (Knopf), sees the garden as a mirror of who we are.

“Grow what you love to eat,” he said. For West, the act of tending a garden is a declaration of joy, identity and even resistance.

In his talk, he invited listeners to reimagine the humble home garden through the lens of the Victory Garden, a once-patriotic wartime project that, in his view, still holds lessons for today’s world. He traced its roots back to August 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to plant vegetables in support of the troops fighting overseas. It was an extraordinary moment: a civilian army of gardeners transforming their backyards into symbols of liberty and national unity.

By World War II, the movement had taken on even greater momentum. About 40 percent of the nation’s produce was grown in Victory Gardens. These patches of earth became acts of hope, duty and perseverance.

But West’s story took an unexpected turn to a very different kind of Victory Garden, one planted not in suburban yards, but in a prison camp in the Owens Valley, in eastern California. Manzanar was one of 10 American concentration camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. West described how incarcerated men, women and children turned the dust into beauty. Against the desolation, they built three kinds of gardens: pleasure gardens with streams and flowers, personal plots for vegetables and large communal farms. Roughly 440 acres bloomed under their care. These gardens at Manzanar fed both body and spirit. They restored dignity, offered comfort and became quiet acts of rebellion. They were peaceful but powerful, West said. They were a way for the prisoners to maintain health, identity and hope in the face of injustice.

Although the Manzanar gardens were eventually erased, their legacy endures. For West, they represent a form of the Victory Garden rooted not in nationalism, but in resilience, creativity and defiance.

He traced the idea forward through time: from the postwar Victory Garden television show on PBS and cookbooks to the radical community gardens of the 1960s and 70s, when Black activists and others turned gardening into food justice. Today, West sees new forms of these “gardens of defiance” springing up, including urban plots built on regenerative principles, no-till farms and backyard beds protesting industrial agriculture. Each is a response to modern anxieties: climate change, toxic food systems, distrust of the government and conventional societal systems, and alienation from the land.

Still, the question remains: “Victory for whom, and against what?” West asked.

In an age without a single national cause, West believes that each gardener defines their own victory, a small but meaningful triumph of care over despair. “A garden,” he said, “is still a way to shake off the paralysis of despair and do something. A garden takes up the fight for a better world, one seed at a time.”

For West, to grow food is to make a statement: that nourishment, pleasure and beauty belong to everyone. Gardening, he insists, is not just an agricultural act, it’s a political one, grounded in ancestral knowledge, indigenous wisdom and the quiet persistence of hope.

And as he often recalls from his late mother, Carol Satterfield, a woman who understood the patience of seasons and the stubborn will of life itself: “A seed wants to grow.”

Farming While Black and Local Voices for Change

After lunch, the symposium turned to a screening of “Farming While Black,” a documentary that follows a new generation of Black farmers reclaiming land and heritage.

The film opens with a stark statistic: In 1910, Black farmers owned roughly 14 percent of U.S. farmland; today, that number has declined to about 2 percent. The documentary spotlights three leaders: Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, Karen Washington of New York City’s community gardens, and Blain Snipstal of Maryland. The three draw on Afro-Indigenous traditions while confronting systemic discrimination in land access and financing.

Following the screening, Abra Lee returned to moderate a discussion with the film’s director Mark Decena and local leaders Sunder Ashni of Mumbet’s Freedom Farm in Sheffield; Gwendolyn VanSant of BRIDGE, a minority and women-run organization dedicated to cultural competence and social justice with a race, gender and poverty lens; and Delinx Cherami of Solidarity Farm and Garden in Great Barrington.

The conversation opened with VanSant reflecting on how community food programs blossomed out of crisis. “Around the time of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, there was a crisis in our community,” she said. “We started delivering food to 35 families. Now we’re serving 200 across Berkshire County.” She emphasized the importance of growing culturally specific foods for families, resettled individuals and new parents seeking nourishment from familiar traditions.

Cherami spoke about the transformative power of access to land. Solidarity Farm and Garden, a project under BRIDGE, now occupies 1.5 acres at the site of the former Great Barrington Fairgrounds, dedicated to food security and food sovereignty. The project allows BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) growers to develop small produce businesses while feeding the local community.

“It’s about acts of hope,” Cherami said. Indeed, in 2024, the farm sent 200 food shares out to local families in financial crisis.

Ashni shared a personal perspective, tracing her family’s roots to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and her current work on Mumbet’s Freedom Farm, named after Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, one of the first slaves to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. (Incidentally, from the windows where the symposium was held, you could see Mumbet’s burial site across the street. “Wow, the ancestors certainly called us here today,” the Georgia-based Lee said when she learned of that.)

“I was really adamant about including Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman's name,” Ashni said, referring to the name of the farm she tends, “because I would get to tell her story over and over again.”

VanSant closed the discussion by calling for collaboration and access.

“There’s land just sitting around unused,” she said. “We [need] it to connect to Mother Earth, to strengthen climate resilience and to feed our communities. Access to land is essential for our communities to thrive.”

The symposium ended with a guided meditation led by community facilitator Sandrine Harris of Emergent Nature, who reminded attendees of one theme that united every voice: The work of renewal begins in the soil beneath our feet.

From Abra Lee’s call to “overbalance ugliness with beauty,” to K Greene’s reminder that “seed is a story,” to Kevin West’s belief that “a garden takes up the fight for a better world, one seed at a time,” the symposium offered both reflection and resolve.

Whether in a backyard, a seed bank or a shared acre of soil, the same truth holds: When people come together to tend what they love, the future begins to bloom.

Indeed, a seed wants to grow.