Seedfolks

by

Paul Fleischman

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Seedfolks makes teaching easy.
Themes and Colors
Gardening and Community Theme Icon
Nature, Mental Health, and the City Theme Icon
The Immigrant Experience Theme Icon
Family, Memory, and the Future Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seedfolks, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gardening and Community Theme Icon

Seedfolks tells the stories of a number of people in a diverse Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood as they come together over the course of a spring and summer to create a community garden. What begins as nine-year-old Kim’s solo attempt to connect with her deceased father through planting lima beans turns into a robust community garden, where various neighbors can meet. People who never would’ve considered talking to each other find that it’s much easier to connect when they have a ready subject to talk about: each other’s gardens and produce. Through telling the stories of the people who are drawn to the garden, Seedfolks shows that gardening has the unique ability to foster community and a shared purpose.

The early chapters of Seedfolks paint a picture of a Cleveland neighborhood that’s dangerous and cold, in part because it lacks community. It’s telling that Kim is initially afraid to enter the abandoned lot to plant her beans. As a nine-year-old girl, she’s small and vulnerable—and other narrators later in the novel confirm that Kim should be afraid. A teenager named Gonzalo, for instance, notes that sitting in public puts one at risk of “some [] gang us[ing] you for target practice,” while a woman named Sae Young tells her story of being robbed at gunpoint and beaten while tending the register of her dry cleaning business. These mentions of violence shows clearly that the neighborhood isn’t safe or connected. And indeed, many people in the neighborhood seem suspicious of their neighbors. An elderly woman named Ana is the first to notice Kim planting her seeds in the garden, though she can’t tell what Kim is doing from her vantage point at her fifth-floor window. So Ana jumps to a conclusion that she implies isn’t so extreme for her neighborhood: that Kim must be burying drugs or is otherwise involved in something nefarious.

The garden, however, soon helps people in the neighborhood learn to trust each other. Several chapters suggest that the neighbors’ suspicions of each other are somewhat overblown, and the garden helps them realize this. Ana, for instance, is distraught when she tries to dig up Kim’s drugs and finds only sprouted bean seeds. Finding sprouted seeds—the beginning of the community garden—instead of drugs forces Ana to look at her neighbors in a new light, starting with Kim. The seeds encourage Ana to see that not all kids in the neighborhood are criminals in the making. This humbling moment is just the first of many instances like this, where people realize that the assumptions they’ve made about each other are incorrect and based on unhelpful stereotypes.

Seedfolks suggests that the primary reason why the garden helps people come to these conclusions is because it’s hard to vilify someone when it’s clear they just want to grow vegetables and flowers. This becomes especially clear in the case of Royce, a Black teenager who begins sleeping in the garden after his father beats him and kicks him out. Several characters describe Royce as intimidating in stature and as making the gardeners nervous when they see him around—but as Royce performs small tasks around the garden such as watering and weeding, he soon becomes a beloved fixture and the recipient of more donated produce than he can eat. Through characters like Royce, Seedfolks shows that most people want to do nice things for each other—and the garden gives them a way to do so. Whether it’s an old man named Wendell watering Kim’s struggling lima beans, Leona taking responsibility for harassing city officials until the city clears the garbage from the lot, or the numerous other instances of people sharing produce with each other, the book shows that the small acts of kindness that take place in the garden form the building blocks of a community.

The garden gives the neighbors a shared sense of purpose, which in turn transforms the dangerous neighborhood into a thriving, tight-knit community. Soon, people start looking out for others’ produce when passersby try to steal vegetables. Some people with gardening experience help novice gardeners with their crops, while others share various ways to cook interesting but unfamiliar vegetables. Everyone with a plot in the garden feels that they’re part of a robust group of people who all want the same thing: to grow something. This urge to protect the garden and each other’s produce soon gives way to grander actions, such as three men chasing another man who steals a woman’s purse, and shouting matches with the people who still insist on throwing garbage into the lot. As people connect with and humanize each other, their aims shift from simply growing vegetables. It becomes important to protect the neighborhood and the people who live in it, both from violence and from anything that might threaten the garden itself.

The neighborhood described in the novel’s final chapters looks wildly different from the one that Kim and Ana describe in the first two chapters. Near the end of the book, Amir, a fabric merchant from Delhi, encapsulates the difference when he notes that, “the garden’s greatest benefit [...] was not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes see our neighbors.” In the garden, he says, “you felt part of a community.” And indeed, the community garden’s first summer season ends with an impromptu harvest party in which every gardener shows up with food to share and instruments to play—a celebration of everything the garden gave them. Participating in a community garden, Seedfolks suggests, isn’t just a way to grow vegetables when a person doesn’t have the backyard space for a private garden; it’s also an important way to nurture and cultivate community.

Related Themes from Other Texts
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Gardening and Community ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gardening and Community appears in each chapter of Seedfolks. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Gardening and Community Quotes in Seedfolks

Below you will find the important quotes in Seedfolks related to the theme of Gardening and Community.
Chapter 1: Kim Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Kim (speaker)
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2: Ana Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ana (speaker), Kim
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3: Wendell Quotes

“What are they?” she asked.

“Some kind of beans.” I grew up on a little farm in Kentucky. “But she planted ‘em way too early. She’s lucky those seeds even came up.”

“But they did,” said Ana. And it’s up to us to save them.”

Related Characters: Ana (speaker), Wendell (speaker), Kim
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

Out of nowhere the words from the Bible came into my head: “And a little child shall lead them.” I didn’t know why at first. Then I did. There’s plenty about my life I can’t change. Can’t bring the dead back to life on this earth. [...] But a patch of ground in this trashy lot—I can change that. Change it big.

Related Characters: Wendell (speaker), Kim
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4: Gonzalo Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Gonzalo (speaker), Tío Juan
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6: Sam Quotes

The week after that someone built a board fence. Then came the first KEEP OUT sign. Then, the crowing achievement—barbed wire.

God, who made Eden, also wrecked the Tower of Babel, by dividing people. From Paradise, the garden was turning back into Cleveland.

Related Characters: Sam (speaker)
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: Virgil Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Virgil (speaker), Virgil’s Father
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: Sae Young Quotes

Vietnamese girl was working there, picking beautiful lima beans. A man and a woman on other side, talking over row of corn. Hear man say his wife give him hoe for birthday. I want to be with people again. Next day I go back and dig small garden. Nobody talk to me that day. But just to be near people, nice people, feel good, like next to fire in winter.

Related Characters: Sae Young (speaker), Kim
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

That day I see man use my funnel. Then woman. Then many people. Feel very glad inside. Feel part of garden. Almost like family.

Related Characters: Sae Young (speaker)
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: Curtis Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Curtis (speaker), Tío Juan, Lateesha
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

You drop bread on the ground and birds come out of nowhere. Same with that garden. People just appeared, people you didn’t know were there. Royce was like that.

Related Characters: Curtis (speaker), Tío Juan, Royce
Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10: Nora Quotes

Gardening boring? Never! It has suspense, tragedy, startling developments—a soap opera growing out of the ground.

Related Characters: Nora (speaker), Mr. Myles
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Nora (speaker), Mr. Myles
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11: Maricela Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Maricela (speaker), Leona
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12: Amir Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Amir (speaker), Kim, Wendell, Sae Young
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Amir (speaker)
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:

She’d gotten quite angry and called me—despite her own accent—a dirty foreigner. Now that we were so friendly with each other I dared to remind her of this. Her eyes became huge. She apologized to me over and over again. She kept saying, “Back then, I didn’t know it was you...”

Related Characters: Amir (speaker)
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13: Florence Quotes

I think of them when I see any of the people who started the garden on Gibb Street. They’re seedfolks too. I’m talking about that first year, before there were spigots and hoses, and the toolshed, and new soil. And before the landlords started charging more for apartments that look on the garden.

Related Characters: Florence (speaker)
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:

It was a little Oriental girl, with a trowel and a plastic bag of lima beans. I didn’t recognize her. It didn’t matter. I felt as happy inside as if I’d just seen the first swallow of spring. Then I looked up. There was the man in the rocker.

We waved and waved to each other.

Related Characters: Florence (speaker), Kim
Related Symbols: Lima Bean Seeds
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis: