As a story about a community garden in an urban environment, the tension between nature and the city is central to Seedfolks. The abandoned lot that eventually becomes the community garden exemplifies what the novel suggests are the downsides of urban environments: it’s covered in smelly garbage, it’s an eyesore, and it suggests that the neighborhood cares little for beauty or nature. However, through the narrators’ stories of coming to the abandoned lot and turning it into a lush community garden, Seedfolks shows that it’s essential for people—and especially city-dwellers—to be able to connect with the natural world for the sake of their own happiness and mental health.
Seedfolks positions the city as the polar opposite of the natural world: where the city is draining, dangerous, and cold, the natural world is nourishing. When characters describe their neighborhood in Cleveland, they overwhelmingly focus on its negative aspects, calling it frightening, dirty, cold, and unfeeling. In contrast, characters’ descriptions of the natural world—both of the community garden that springs up in a vacant lot, as well of their memories of childhoods spent in rural locations—are almost entirely positive. For instance, Leona, who spent her childhood in Georgia, reminisces about her Granny’s goldenrod patch and appreciation for nature, while a Jewish man named Sam says of the community garden that “Squatting there in the cool of the evening, planting our seeds, a few other people working, a robin singing out all the while, it seemed to me that we were in truth in Paradise, a small garden of Eden.” While Sam is the only character to describe the garden as being akin to the biblical Garden of Eden, he’s not the only one to refer to it as a paradise and a refuge from the ills of the rest of the city. This suggests a natural hierarchy: cities may be a necessary fact of the modern world, but per the logic of the novel, they are perhaps a necessary evil—while nature is the antidote.
Indeed, many characters who are new to gardening find that the natural world has more to offer than they ever thought possible. Curtis is delighted as he watches his precious tomato plants grow tall, produce buds and then flowers, and finally produce tomatoes that turn from green to red. The nurse Nora at one point says, “Gardening boring? Never! It has suspense, tragedy, startling developments—a soap opera growing out of the ground.” When one is willing to look and notice this natural “soap opera,” the novel suggests, it’s endlessly entertaining and can provide just as much satisfaction as anything one can find in the city.
Finally, Seedfolks suggests that the natural world is also essential to a person’s health, particularly their mental health. The novel shows this most clearly in the case of Mr. Myles, an elderly Black man who is wheelchair-bound and cannot speak after suffering multiple strokes. Nora, his nurse, makes a point to take Mr. Myles out for walks, but she notices that he still seems to be withdrawing and declining. This all changes on the day their walk takes them past the community garden. As Nora watches Mr. Myles begin to engage with others and plant flower seeds, she remembers that “ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad.” There’s a rich history, in other words, of nature improving people’s mental states. While the city views couldn’t spark Mr. Myles’s interest and his will to live, connecting with nature through the community garden renews his desire to enjoy what’s left of his life. Similarly, participating in the community garden helps Sae Young, a Korean immigrant who has spent the last several years recovering from the trauma of being robbed at gunpoint and then beaten, finds that the garden is an essential element to her recovery. She’s always been a gregarious person who, despite developing a crushing fear of people after her assault, desperately missed being around others—and in the garden, Sae Young takes the final steps to overcome her fear and move past her trauma. In this way, the positive effects of the garden on her mental health are immeasurable, as it essentially gives Sae Young her life back.
In addition, Seedfolks proposes that it’s not necessary to actually cultivate a plot oneself to reap the benefits of the garden; rather, simply having a place to observe and connect with the natural world is enough to improve city life immeasurably. While the novel focuses many of its early chapters on people who actually cultivate vegetables in the garden, the book’s final narrator, Florence, is a “watcher”—that is, a person who isn’t able to physically garden, but who still delights in watching the garden grow and flourish. A person doesn’t actually have to participate in digging in the dirt to benefit from immersing themselves in nature. A number of other people in the neighborhood enjoy the garden from their windows—and Florence, who narrates from at least a year after the community garden’s first season, notes that landlords eventually start charging more for the apartments that look out over the garden. While this raises a whole host of other issues, such as the possibility that the primarily low-income people who started the garden may soon be unable to afford to live so close to it, it nevertheless speaks to the value of carving out space for nature in an urban environment. Seedfolks shows that city life is better and healthier for everyone when that city offers opportunities to connect with the natural world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature, Mental Health, and the City ThemeTracker
Nature, Mental Health, and the City Quotes in Seedfolks
I never had children of my own, but I’ve seen enough in that lot to know she was mixed up in something she shouldn’t be. And after twenty years typing for the Parole department, I just about knew what she’d buried. Drugs most likely, or money, or a gun.
“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.”
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.
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.
Six and a half hours later I found out the lot was owned by the city. But the people running Cleveland don’t usually come down here, unless they take a wrong turn on the freeway. You can’t measure the distance between my block and City Hall in miles.
Sometimes I think I’ve actually had more effect on the world since I retired. What do I do? I smile at people, especially black people and the ones from different countries. I get ‘em looking up at me instead of down or off to the side. I start up conversations in lines and on the bus and with cashiers. People see I’m friendly, no matter what they’ve heard about whites or Jews. If I’m lucky, I get ‘em talking to each other. Sewing up the rips in the neighborhood.
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.
That day I see man use my funnel. Then woman. Then many people. Feel very glad inside. Feel part of garden. Almost like family.
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.
Gardening boring? Never! It has suspense, tragedy, startling developments—a soap opera growing out of the ground.
A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily.
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.
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.
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.
