Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
Books by Black Women Writers Who Shape How I See the Garden
14
items The books that shape how I think about flowers, gardens, land, and the long inheritance of growing while Black. Some are practical, some are literary, some are both. None of them treat the garden as decoration. Built for anyone, grower, designer, rea...
Terir's book profiles Black floral designers and growers across the country, including me. It's the first book of its kind, and it documents a community that the floral industry has historically rendered invisible. Buy it for the work, the photograph...
Black Flora: Inspiring Profiles of Floriculture's New Vanguard by Teresa Speight
The pear tree scene taught me what a flower could mean before I knew I'd grow them for a living. Hurston writes the natural world as a place where Black women come into themselves. I return to this book when I need to remember why the work matters.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Dungy on diversifying her own Colorado garden against the white aesthetic of suburban HOA landscaping. A memoir about what it means to make a garden that reflects who actually lives in it. One of the best garden books written this decade.
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille Dungy
Short, blistering, essential. Kincaid writes about Antigua, tourism, colonialism, the British garden imposed on Caribbean land, with a clarity most writers spend a career trying to reach. The kind of book that should be req
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Garden historian Advolly Richmond traces the cultural and trade histories behind the flowers we grow, origins, journeys, the people whose names got erased from the record. The kind of book that makes you see your own beds differently.
A Short History of Flowers: The Stories That Make Our Gardens by Advolly Richmond
The practical and political handbook for Black growers. Soil management, cooperative economics, ancestral practices, land access. A serious piece of documentation from Soul Fire Farm, and a useful reference whether or not you're new to the work.
Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman
A practical handbook for growing flowers for the vase, written by a working flower farmer in the Bloom series. Cel is in my Black Flower Farmers network, and her approach, considered, considerate, deeply skilled, comes through on every page. A great ...
Cut Flowers by Celestina Robertson
Kincaid on her actual Vermont garden, the plants she chose, the ones she failed with, the colonial history embedded in every Latin name. Funny, sharp, unsentimental. The garden writing I wish more people read.
My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid
Stories of Haitian women, land, memory, and survival. Not a garden book on its face, but Danticat writes soil and place with a depth most nature writers never reach.
Krik? Krak!
Dungy gathers four hundred years of poems about land, work, weather, and growing. A reference I keep returning to.
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy
Lindsey Stewart traces four hundred years of Black women's spiritual, herbal, and medicinal practice in America, the conjure traditions that reshaped American food, medicine, and culture while their authors went uncredited. For anyone working with pl...
The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic by Lindsey Stewart
Plant biologist Beronda Montgomery on seven trees and the cotton shrub, and the Black American history written into each. Pecans domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine, sycamores as Underground Railroad markers, willows as medicine. The Bl...
When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy by Beronda Montgomery
Amber Grossman built the BlackGirlsGardening community on Instagram and turned it into a book profiling thirty-one women growing in backyards, community gardens, and full farms. A coffee table book that doubles as a record of who's actually doing thi...
Black Girls Gardening by Amber Grossman
Baszile gathers essays, poems, oral histories, and photography on Black farming in America, past and present. Land loss, land return, the long arc of Black agriculture, and the people working the soil now. The most comprehensive document of the field...
We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie Baszile