“Resilience in the Garden”

Normally, my life resembles that of a squirrel. On the move, I dart here and there, scurrying in a blur of lecture halls, trains and planes. With the pandemic my life became plant-like. Like a seed tossed on the ground I lay there inert, in shock. Slowly aligning myself in the new, grounded state, I started to reach out in two directions; down into the cool moist earth and skyward toward a new awareness of what constitutes stillness, growth, and regeneration in Washington, DC, where I have lived for two decades.  

With a friend, we got started. On a small terraced slope in front of an apartment building we planted spring crops—peas, radishes, greens. We dug into fallow beds along the grade school across the street, broadcasting seeds up the hill. We pulled out dead shrubs and replaced them with blackberry bushes, fig and paw paw trees. People were gardening all over the U.S. Seeds were sold out. No backyard chicks to be had. We propagated our own saplings and scavenged seeds from last year’s crops. 

About the time the peas blossomed, a Minneapolis policeman calmly knee-murdered George Floyd. On the first day, the Black Lives Matter protest in front of the White House was small. It skewed young and POC. The protestors faced the police and cursed them. Hoarse voices made spontaneous speeches. I remember thinking—I write this now with a wince—that the young folks on Lafayette Square could use a leader and a message. Where was MLK or Malcolm X? Who had the dream and who the light?  

Preparing for the long summer, we spaded up the school’s courtyard and dropped in seeds that can stand the heat and drought—okra, long beans, corn, amaranth. The soil was deeply dispiriting—urban ground smashed by heavy wheels, littered with foreign objects (nails, glass, plastic), poisoned with heavy metals. Driving my shovel in, I looked down to see a field of extinction—no worms, insects, fungi, little in the way of microbial life.  

The three women who founded the BLM movement explicitly rejected the idea of a single, charismatic leader. The co-founders’ names have not become household words, and that is telling. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi represent Female, Black, Queer, working-class and immigrant Americans. They work behind the scenes in that nameless way that a growing majority of Americans are quietly building movements. 

Regenerating the soil involved hauling: buckets of kitchen compost, home-made microbial inoculants, leaf mulch, coffee grounds, worm casings, and wheel barrows of cooked, human manure from the DC waste treatment plant. Layered over the raw clay and gravel the organic matter worked as food for a crowd of microbes who invisibly got to work restoring topsoil to the beds. Plants have a reputation for slowness, even sloth, but soil microbes work at a good clip. They adapt  by swapping genes. Passing on whole strands of DNA, they transform themselves. Some microbes have learned not only to survive in toxic environments, but have figured out to eat heavy metals and PCBs⁠1 for dinner! Microbes are a model of resilience. Thanks to beneficial microbes, our soils regenerated in a vegetative blink of an eye. The plants followed, emerging from the ground in the rains of early summer.  

Our neighbor Richard had a habit of standing on his porch each evening. Richard grew up on the street and clocked fifty years watching it. As we dug, he asked us what we were planting. After a while, Richard asked if we wanted to garden his front yard. I was happy about that. I had been hoping our expanding gardens would become infectious. Plants, tended and nourished, I  dreamed, could repair bit by bit some of the social and health problems of our city. “Slow hope,” Christof Mauch calls it.⁠2 

Two nights of looting and glass breaking. The protestors knew their history and did not repeat 1968 when crowds lit up the Black shopping district on 14th Street. This time they broke windows on Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues in predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods that locals call “upper Caucasia.” The next day a moat of armed, bullet-proof bodies circled the White House; hundreds of officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies. That was the day of Donald Trump’s bible walk. At 6:30 pm, a half hour before curfew, a phalanx of Secret Service officers moved from behind the blockade into the crowd. I hurried to unlock my bike and flee home.  

I watched on my cell phone the sickening thud of blows and cries of protestors “kettled” that evening. I wasn’t the only one connecting the bodies beaten by police with bodies “weathered” by stress, poverty, and environmental toxins that were falling ill at high numbers from COVID. 

The following day the protests swelled. The crowds skewed whiter and older. Like the virus, unleashed state violence threatened everyone. Again I left Lafayette Square just before curfew. As I pedaled home a steady current of resistors, their  faces set with grim determination, flowed downtown to defy the curfew.  

 My friend and I kept going, vacuous lawn beckoning. We set down more saplings. Tiny paw paw sent tap roots deep underground. Fig trees spread broad leafs up, airborne hands seeking communion, breathing. The pole beans did not require poles. The beans reached out—clearly not blindly—and found walls, sticks, and fencing to string together little, green rope bridges. A firetruck lumbered down our hill, stopping in front of Richard’s house. For two weeks Richard had been missing from the porch. From the asparagus patch I asked if everything was all right, Richard’s mother and brother slowly shook their heads no.  

The problem with slow hope is that unfolds in vegetable time, while the virus moves at the speed of jets. 

The second week the crowds on the yellow asphalt of Black Lives Matter Plaza turned their backs to the army boys and municipal police and faced each other. Black protestors shared their experience of being Black in America. Some sang and more danced, expressing joy after months of isolation. Surrounded by tanks painted beige for Middle Eastern wars, white allies came to better understand how Black survivors of systemic racism are models of courage and resilience. Like a microbial colony getting organized, inspiration and resolve passed horizontally, tiny genes encoding the DNA of the movement.  

1 http://nautil.us/blog/in-the-black-mayonnaise-of-brooklyns-gowanus-canal-alien-life-is-being-born 

2 https://aeon.co/essays/we-need-slow-hope-in-a-world-of-accelerating-ecological-change 

— Kate Brown, Boston