The Ancestral Roots Community Garden is in Chattanooga’s Menlo Park Neighborhood. The garden plantings and design are inspired by traditional Southern African American yards and home gardens. Greens, beans, okra, muscadine, herbs, corn, watermelons and squash are all growing in the garden. Also included are a row of fruit trees and flowering plants. The garden […]
Gardening, and living out-of-doors, come naturally to me thanks to my family. I myself moved so often as an adult that only now, after twenty years in Tennessee, have I been rooted long enough to see a flourishing garden emerge. It is named after a famous Comanche warrior, Quanah Parker, and we called our Parker, […]
The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to engagement following my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, thereby, enlarging her narrowing view of her world. She had been an inveterate gardener and had lived in tune with the seasons. The everyday visual signs of nature—sunshine, birds, […]
The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to engagement following my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, thereby, enlarging her narrowing view of her world. She had been an inveterate gardener and had lived in tune with the seasons. The everyday visual signs of nature—sunshine, […]
The Garden Path: Green, Growing, and Blooming Project Journal Assisted Living Facility #1, Sevierville, TN The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to engagement,following my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, a connection enlarging her narrowing view of her world. She had been an inveterate […]
“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.” ―Vandana Shiva If building soil health, growing organically, and sharing fresh food with our neighbors is “making peace with the Earth”, Grow Appalachia is […]
In the fall of 2012, a group of environmentally-conscious high school students in Memphis, Tennessee, gathered around an idea. We wanted a vegetable garden to grow in our public high school, White Station, one of the largest schools in the state. Three months later, we’d raised $5,000, surged to seventy students strong, and negotiated with […]
In the 1960s I learned everything I needed to know about gardening and cooking from one of the original organic gardeners and foodies: my grandmother. After World War II she noticed that it was hard to get good produce anymore; the peddlers who used to sell door-to-door didn’t come around any more. So she bought […]