Behind the garage, Woodman pointed at the garlic scapes shooting from the soil. Tens of bulbs laid in rows, with a hole adjacent to the white-stained wood of the garage. The hole was hidden between the soil, leaves, and towering garlic stalks. A nest of bunnies resided within it, the mother bunny protecting her kin from predators. Whomever is rolling this cycle of life, Woodman says, she’s damn grateful to bear witness to it during Trump’s presidency and the pandemic.

Woodman spent her adult life as a writer and poet. She graduated with a master’s in literature from the University of Central Florida in 1980 and taught writing, literature, and linguistics in the English Department of her alma mater for eight years, then at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth online for 23 years. “I remember being struck when I was in graduate school by the thought that if you've dug down deep enough, under any discipline, you'll find they were all connected,” Woodman says. She sees this embedded in her garden.

In a self-published poetry collection from 2016, Necessary Language: Free Verse on Five Themes, “Growing Seasons” serves as one of the five themes. The last stanza of “Spring Song” reads: “Wisps of clouds decorate that blue dome / Vegetable reflections shot into the upper world / Reminding everything that it’s all ruled by the sun / By the same sun that browns my skin while I grow / Roots from my feet deep into soil to join the garlic.” Yet, throughout the past five years of political turmoil and pandemic existentialism, Woodman couldn’t find it in herself to write. It was the life of the garden that kept her rolling.

There’s a collectivity to gardening — whether that’s among the critters and the sun or beside other gardeners. It cultivates community and becomes therapeutic. Hilda Mechthild Krus, the director of the Horticultural Society of New York's GreenHouse Program on Rikers Island Correctional Facility, believes in the importance of horticultural therapy, or plant therapy. The program teaches incarcerated individuals the basics of gardening. The society provides the necessary tools, seeds, and equipment for the garden, and those in the program decide the crops, tend to the garden, and engage with one another as a community. “I think the benefit of being in a garden together and taking care of land brings people together,” Krus says. “We are all in this garden together, and there is a shift — we are all just people maintaining land together.”

On the other side of the country, Cathrine Sneed, founder of The Garden Project, implemented a similar program at the San Francisco County Jail San Bruno Complex in the 1980s. Sneed saw how ex-convicts failed to receive help once they were released. In 1992, she founded The Garden Project to employ ex-convicts and to support them post-release. The organically grown fruits and vegetables harvested from the Carroll Street Garden in Hunters Point are donated to restaurants, communities, and people across the city. In the 33 years since its conception, The Garden Project has provided jobs to more than 1,000 people. “It would not have been had it been anything other than gardening,” Sneed says. She taught her employees how to plant seeds, till, harvest, make compost, and care for the growth of the plants. From prisoners to ex-prisoners to disadvantaged youth, Sneed worked with a diverse group of people planting, caring, and growing together. “Working, and particularly working with plants and being a gardener, you have power that you don’t have otherwise,” Sneed says. “The power to change things, to make them better, to make them different — with your hands.”

Anthony Travis Jr. echoes that sentiment. He believes gardening transformed his life. Travis Jr. met Sneed in the 1980s when he gardened at the San Bruno Complex garden. After his release for the second time, he found no jobs or programs available to help him grow except for The Garden Project. “I wanted something different,” Travis says. “By the time I had the opportunity to show someone that I do want to work, she gave me that opportunity.” Travis Jr. worked with both The Garden Project and the Tree Corps, a program that planted more than 10,000 street trees in San Francisco. “I was planting little baby trees, and now I can go back to those trees right now and look at them,” Travis Jr. says. “There are big tall trees, strong trees, and I can climb up some of them. I planted these trees. I planted them.” After years of gardening, he now works as the chief steward for the Union 261 and as a General Foreman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Department and continues to garden in his own backyard and volunteer in community gardens.

Members of The Garden Project harvest green onions from a container bed. Founder Cathrine Sneed believes planting seeds happens with plants and people. “What I know about seeds is that they grow when the conditions are right. When they have the right light, when they have enough air, when they have enough water — they grow. That’s true for us. That seed is going to grow if we get what we need to help the growth happen.” Courtesy of The Garden Project website.

In fact, Sneed defines what she does as cultivating hope. And that work takes on a greater importance when hard times arrive — 38-year-old Veronica Moore discovered that when she experienced profound loss. “Gardening is a part of my fabric,” Moore says. But as a child, and despite having a mother who surrounded their homes with plants, she failed to recognize the healing afforded from plant care. But in 2018, when her sister passed away unexpectedly, Moore found herself needing a therapeutic grieving process. After a year spent in traditional therapy, she turned to dirt and growing green things. “Traditional talk therapy was preparing me to love again; it was preparing me to nurture things again, it was preparing me to heal my heart,” Moore says. “All through plants, all through watching the plants grow, all through making the adjustment that needs to be made in order for the progress of the plant.”

Caring for plants transformed into comfort, and she wanted to share that experience to enrich others’ lives. In April of 2020, Moore launched her Instagram, Brown Skin Plant Mama, as a place for people to learn about plant therapy and engage in topics surrounding the plant community. Her account boasts 11,800 followers, and she hosts an IGTV series, Plant Therapy is Real, where she and another member of the plant community discuss plant therapy, plant love and care, and the experience of being Black both in the plant community and in greater society.

On March 8, Moore and Kamili Bell Hill, the founder of @blackpeople.wplants and @plantblerd, laughed about plant care and gardening technology, and discussed the lack of representation in the plant community. Bell Hill founded Black People With Plants in June of 2020 after the death of George Floyd to showcase Black plant caretakers with joy and happiness. In late May and early June, other plant pages featured Black Lives Matter content and Black planters and pledged to include Black voices following Floyd’s death, but went back to their page weeks later like nothing occurred. Black planters vanished from #Plantstagram feeds as if anti-racist due diligance was achieved. Bell Hill took matters in her own hands. “That’s how Black People With Plants was born” Bell Hill says. “Just a love letter to Black planters.” The page has more than 28,000 followers with over 2,000 reposts of Black planters. Her plant pages grew a community. “We live in a society so driven by technology,” Bell Hill says. “And here we are reconnecting with nature in a way that I think is so important.” Social media is known for its isolating qualities but Bell Hill sees the virtual plant community as the connective tissue to begin and strengthen friendships.

Plant therapy informs the personal and professional pieces of Moore’s life. Her website, launched in October 2020, includes guides for new plant buyers and incorporates plant therapy into schools. The program is designed to teach young students, from preschool to eighth grade, plant care and plant therapy. Moore first taught her four-year-old daughter, Hunter, the importance of plant care as it imparts lessons of responsibility and attention to detail. What began as an initiative in Hunter’s classroom, transformed into providing plants to over 300 students and teachers in Lehigh Valley. “We’re able to teach children at a young age the benefits and what they can learn from plant care,” says Moore. “This is an exercise, an opportunity, to teach children in a different way.” Any child, she believes, can learn how plants are emotionally beneficial. For Moore, pruning, the act of cutting away dead plant matter, serves as her favorite type of plant care. “When I see a leaf turning yellow or brown, I’m ready to clean it and to give that plant a bit of fresh air,” Moore says. “Like ‘oh this dead weight is off of me.’” And that act serves as a metaphor for self-care too. “The dead weight that we remove from our lives like the mess or the toxic people or environments,” she says. “when we remove those things from our being, we are free to grow, and we can prosper.” For Moore, gardening represents the physical labor of removing the grime from our own lives and benefits from an intentionality that comes from slowing down, looking at what is new, and reflecting.

As I walked through Woodman’s garden, she pointed to the dead leaves serving as a pillow for a planter. The worms love it, apparently. And when the worms munch on it, the soil is nourished and ready to be rooted. In that same soil, I shoveled holes to plant different types of potatoes. As I dug, I hit a rock that emerged with eyes and scalloped skin. A chameleon-like grey-brown toad croaked next to my shovel, and Woodman exclaimed it was the same one she bothered a few hours before just a few feet away at the end of the planter. It had migrated and burrowed again. I planted potatoes in rows. Woodman shoveled compost on top of the top layer of soil and potatoes before dousing them in water. The toad watched, sharing the space, as we worked to grow next year’s worth of stews and home fries. Silence took over the space as we each let our minds wander and our hands connected to the earth. Then, we turned towards the soon-to-be tomatoes.