A number of the gardeners in Seedfolks are drawn to the community garden not because they personally want to garden, but because a family member does. And while much of the story focuses on how gardening benefits individuals, it’s clear that it has a positive impact on families, too. As Seedfolks shows, gardening can strengthen families through the generations by connecting people to their memories and family history—as well as helping them carry those memories and old traditions into the future.
Gardening, Seedfolks suggests, can be a way for people to remember and connect with deceased family members. The novel’s very first chapter articulates this idea. Nine-year-old Kim’s father, a farmer, died eight months before she was born, so she never knew him. She decides to plant her lima bean seeds the night after his death anniversary, after wondering if her father’s spirit even knows who she is. Kim wants to show her father’s spirit that she is his daughter by taking part in gardening, something that was essential to his identity. For Kim, gardening helps her feel more connected to a father she never knew, but she isn’t the only one who comes to the garden to connect with a deceased relative. Leona, a Black woman who grew up in the South with her Granny, decides to plant goldenrod in her Granny’s honor. It gives Leona satisfaction to be able to honor her grandmother in this way, and to pass her grandmother’s wisdom about medicinal plants and herbal remedies on to future generations.
Seedfolks shows that gardening also provides a venue through which older generations can connect with younger ones. Many of the novel’s young narrators, like Virgil and Gonzalo, only get to know their older family members on a deeper level once they start gardening together. While Gonzalo sees his great-uncle Tío Juan as having nothing to offer at first, he soon realizes he’s all wrong about this the moment he sees Tío Juan expertly handle seeds and turn over soil. Tío Juan, a former Guatemalan farmer, has so much expertise to offer younger generations—but he can only share his wealth of knowledge once he and Gonzalo get involved with the garden, where he’s an expert. The garden, then, causes Tío Juan to become a fully formed person in his great-nephew’s eyes. In this vein, Seedfolks shows that the garden provides opportunities for young people to humanize their older relatives. Virgil, for instance, watches in dismay as his father plants six plots of a fancy baby lettuce—and then lies to other gardeners by claiming that each plot is for a family member who can’t garden. In reality, Virgil’s father intends to keep all the lettuce for himself to sell. Virgil has never seen an adult lie to get ahead before, let alone his own father. But this only makes Virgil’s father seem more human to his young son. While Seedfolks only gives an open-ended conclusion to Virgil’s story, it nevertheless makes the case that through their involvement in the garden, Virgil is getting a more well-rounded view of his father—something he perhaps wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
Overall, Seedfolks suggests that the garden provides families a place to learn to appreciate each other—and a way to pass on knowledge. For Amir and Florence, going to the garden provides them with the opportunity to teach others about respect and kindness. Amir teaches his toddler son, for instance, to not pick produce before it’s ready, while Florence coaches adult passersby to not pick others’ vegetables without asking. Perhaps even more importantly, though, the garden offers parents and grandparents who spent much of their lives outside of the U.S. the space to teach children and grandchildren about crops native to their home countries. Amir introduces his son to a special kind of eggplant, while a number of narrators describe other parents teaching their children and neighbors about various hot peppers, herbs, or melons. More than just a plot to grow produce, the community garden becomes a place where people can connect with their family members on a deeper level, and where the children of immigrants can learn about their culture. And while it’s worth noting that it’s not necessarily just gardens with the potential to provide these opportunities, Seedfolks nevertheless makes it clear that it’s essential that people have a place to get to know their relatives and their history. Only then can people truly understand who they are and keep the wisdom and memories of past generations alive.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Memory, and the Future ThemeTracker
Family, Memory, and the Future Quotes in Seedfolks
I dug six holes. All his life in Vietnam my father had been a farmer. Here our apartment house had no yard. But in that vacant lot he would see me. He would watch my beans break ground and spread, and would notice with pleasure their pods growing plump. He would see my patience and my hard work. I would show him that I could raise plants, as he had. I would show him that I was his daughter.
I tried a new spot and found another [bean], then a third. Then the truth of it slapped me full in the face. I said to myself, “What have you done?” Two beans had roots. I knew I’d done them harm. I felt like I’d read through her secret diary and had ripped out a page without meaning to.
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
I couldn’t believe it. I stomped outside. I could feel that eighteen-speed slipping away. I was used to seeing kids lying and making mistakes, but not grown-ups. I was mad at my father. Then I sort of felt sorry for him.
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
Most were old. Many grew plants from their native lands—huge Chinese melons, ginger, cilantro, a green the Jamaicans call Callaloo, and many more. Pantomime was often required to get over language barriers. Yet we were all subject to the same weather and pests, the same neighborhood, and the same parental emotions toward our plants.
She talked on, how plants don’t run on electricity or clock time, how none of nature did. How nature ran on sunlight and rain and the seasons, and how I was a part of that system. The words sort of put me into a daze. My body was part of nature. I was related to bears, to dinosaurs, to plants, to things that were a million years old. It hit me that this system was much older and stronger than the other. She said how it wasn’t some disgrace to be part of it. She said it was an honor. I stared at the squash plants. It was a world in there. It seemed like I could actually see the leaves and flowers growing and changing. I was in that weird daze. And for just that minute I stopped wishing my baby would die.
In India we have many vast cities, just as in America. There, too, you are one among millions. But there at least you know your neighbors. Here, one cannot say that. The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they’re known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices.
In the summers in Delhi, so very hot, my sisters and I would lie upon it and try to press ourselves into its world. The garden’s green was as soothing to the eye as the deep blue of that rug. I’m aware of color—I manage a fabric store. But the garden’s greatest benefit, I feel, was not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes see our neighbors.
