Rooted Resistance

Living Maps That Encoded Freedom in Plain Sight

My first discovery of having a green thumb came unexpectedly during my time living near Eutaw Street in Baltimore. I started small, growing moringa in upcycled turquoise storage containers, nurturing lemon trees in ceramic pots, and cultivating Thai basil and lavender in repurposed takeout containers. Each seedling that thrived under my care revealed something about myself I hadn't fully recognized before.

My neighbor, an elder Scorpio woman with wisdom etched into her face like growth rings in a tree, noticed my budding garden and offered me use of her heavy-duty construction cart. "For gathering bricks," she explained, pointing toward the abandoned buildings that punctuated our neighborhood. Those forgotten structures became unlikely nurseries, providing materials to fortify my growing garden. Our conversations over fence lines while tending our respective plants gradually wove us into each other's lives. Eventually, I found myself running garden errands for her, bringing back seeds or soil amendments, our relationship rooted in this shared practice.

Mt. Vernon Place, Baltimore MD

Being a Taurus, these acts of nurturing the earth connected me to something fundamental. The simple practice of tending my immediate environment opened unexpected doorways to ancestral wisdom. Conversations with my paternal grandmother blossomed during this period. She revealed how our family had migrated to Philadelphia from Darlington, South Carolina during the Great Migration, that massive northward movement of Black Americans seeking opportunity beyond the segregated South.

"When I was twelve," she told me, "they sent me back home to Darlington for a summer." Her eyes brightened with the memory. "That's where I learned to process tobacco. You wouldn't believe how green and luscious everything was there." I could see her hands, now weathered with age, remembering the motions of that long-ago work.

Around this same time, my mother began sharing stories about my maternal grandfather, a sharecropper in Ahoskie, North Carolina before his family migrated to Trenton in the early 1970s. The symmetry wasn't lost on me. By putting my hands in Baltimore soil, I had unwittingly sparked a recovery of family memories, each story pointing to "where I get it from." That green thumb may have skipped their generations, but it landed squarely in my lap, carrying with it the weight and wonder of inheritance.

left: dried Tobacco, right: my Granny (centered) and her sibs

Now living in Southern Arizona, I've begun the complex work of touching the pain associated with cash crops like cotton and tobacco. These plants, once instruments of deep suffering, have become power plants for me. Their beautiful forms carry energetic imprints damaged alongside Black Americans during enslavement. I find more healing working alongside them, understanding that the ancestral trauma runs parallel to their exploitation, than I do avoiding them or allowing their presence to stir only disgust. We'll explore this relationship between contested plants and healing practices in greater detail in a future post.

Hidden Food Maps

For communities denied access to conventional cartography, gardens offered an alternative mapping technology, hiding sophisticated directional systems beneath seemingly utilitarian purpose. Where paper maps could be confiscated or destroyed, living maps of carefully planted food crops created persistent navigational systems that refreshed themselves seasonally while providing essential sustenance.

The dual function of these garden maps, simultaneously producing food and encoding direction, created perfect cover for their cartographic purpose. Even if discovered by enslavers, these growing spaces appeared merely as subsistence gardens rather than revolutionary technologies. This brilliant adaptation transformed apparent constraint into innovative cartographic approach that operated beneath official awareness.

Historical documentation from the Federal Writers' Project and oral histories reveal how certain plants were strategically placed to mark pathways toward freedom. Research suggests that specific arrangements of crops could indicate direction, distance, or presence of safe houses, creating green roadmaps for those seeking liberation.

Artist's conception of enslaved labor in the garden at Belle Grove Plantation, NPS Artwork by Keith Rocco

The brilliance of using food crops as directional markers cannot be overstated. Unlike obvious signs that would immediately raise suspicion, these living maps created deniable navigation system. If questioned, one could truthfully state the garden's purpose as food production while its secondary cartographic function remained hidden.

Botanical Knowledge Systems

Beyond directional guidance, garden maps encoded vital knowledge about which plants could heal and which could harm. Medicinal and poisonous plants were often visually similar, requiring sophisticated botanical literacy to distinguish properly.

Gardens strategically positioned similar-looking plants to teach this critical difference through proximity comparison: a white flowering plant with edible roots might be planted near nearly identical species with toxic properties, creating visual education in plant discernment. This cartographic arrangement preserved knowledge that couldn't safely be written down but could be regularly reinforced through direct observation.

What fascinates me most about this botanical cartography is how it transformed conventional understanding of what constitutes a "map." Rather than fixed representation on paper, these living maps created dynamic, seasonal knowledge systems that required embodied relationship with plants themselves.

This list of 15 Historic Black American Gardens documents many of these historical plant relationships, preserving knowledge that connects contemporary gardeners with ancestral wisdom. These resources remind us that botanical knowledge served not just as survival mechanism but as active form of resistance against deliberate attempts to sever cultural continuity.

Seed Preservation as Ancestral Memory

The preservation of seeds represents perhaps the most profound cartographic technology within Black agricultural practice. When enslaved Africans braided rice, okra, and cotton seeds into their hair before the Middle Passage, they weren't simply carrying food sources but entire knowledge systems encoded in genetic material.

Each seed variety carried information about its homeland, growing conditions, and cultural practices. Some varieties of rice brought from West Africa, for instance, could grow in soil conditions similar to those found in the Carolinas, allowing transplanted agricultural knowledge to take root in new territories. The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor preserves many of these agricultural traditions that demonstrate how seed preservation created living connection to ancestral landscapes.

Heriloom Seed Preservation technique

These seeds became living archives, biological records that preserved cultural memory even when written documentation was forbidden or destroyed. The act of planting became act of remembrance, each garden a geographical reference point connecting present location to ancestral homeland. The cartography of seeds mapped not just physical space but temporal relationships, connecting past, present, and future through cycles of planting and harvest.

The Clockless Garden

One of the most profound aspects of Black garden practices was their relationship with time. While plantation agriculture imposed rigid mechanistic time structures, garden spaces operated according to natural rhythms that resisted industrial temporality. This alternative relationship with time created freedom within confinement, establishing temporal sovereignty even under extreme physical constraint.

Garden timing followed natural indicators rather than clock hours: when morning glory opened its blooms, when dew dried from certain leaves, when particular bird songs marked transitions between day phases. These natural timekeepers created alternative temporal framework that operated parallel to but independent from the enslaver's schedule.

This temporal resistance continued through generations. My grandfather's sharecropping experience in North Carolina included knowledge of planting by moon phases rather than calendar dates, understanding that natural rhythms affected plant growth more reliably than arbitrary numbering systems. This knowledge passed through family lines represents sophisticated understanding of natural cycles that predates and often surpasses industrial agricultural timing.

Nocturnal Gardens

Night gardens represent another remarkable cartographic innovation within Black agricultural tradition. Certain plants with white or light-colored flowers were deliberately planted to create visible pathways at night, their reflective qualities providing navigation assistance during darkness when movement might be safest.

Moon gardens, as these plantings are sometimes called, included night-blooming species like evening primrose, night-blooming jasmine, and white four o'clocks alongside light-colored flowering plants that remained visible after sunset. These botanical arrangements created subtle but functional night maps, alternative pathways visible without artificial light.

Moon Garden in full bloom

Earthing and Liberation

The practice known today as "earthing" or "grounding" has particular significance within Black garden traditions. Direct physical contact with soil created literal grounding connection associated with both physiological and psychological benefits, especially important under conditions of extreme stress and trauma.

Historical accounts from formerly enslaved individuals collected through the Born in Slavery collection frequently mention garden spaces as sites of temporary respite and renewal. The simple act of touching earth, of working with plants, provided healing connection distinct from forced agricultural labor.

This relationship with soil represents a form of cartographic practice mapping therapeutic territories within oppressive landscapes. Garden spaces became islands of relative autonomy, plots of earth where one could experience momentary liberation through connection with natural systems operating outside human control.

Hands working soil

Seeds of Resistance

The garden as resistance space has continued through generations of Black agricultural practice. From victory gardens in urban centers during the Great Migration to contemporary community gardens in neighborhoods facing food apartheid, these growing spaces represent ongoing cartographic tradition mapping liberation within constraint.

Organizations like Soul Fire Farm continue this legacy by teaching sustainable agricultural practices rooted in Black agricultural traditions. Their work demonstrates how garden cartography remains vital technology for mapping pathways toward food sovereignty and community self-determination.

The seeds my grandmother described from South Carolina tobacco fields and my grandfather planted as a young boy, sharecropping in North Carolina, have found new expression in my Arizona desert containers. The knowledge encoded in generations of careful cultivation continues to unfold, revealing maps not just of physical territories but of relationship patterns sustained across centuries of disruption.

Urban community garden

When I touch cotton plants in the fields near my solo campsite here in Southern AZ, I'm touching complex history that contains both exploitation and expertise, both trauma and triumph. These plants that once bound my ancestors to land through forced labor now offer different relationship based in choice and reciprocity. By visiting and harvesting them through my own free will, I participate in transforming their cartographic meaning from imprisonment to liberation.

Different Maps Create Different Possibilities

Maps are never neutral representations of reality but technologies that structure perception through specific filters. The garden-centered cartography of Black agricultural traditions creates fundamentally different possibilities than conventional paper mapping or digital navigation systems.

While conventional cartography abstracts space into standardized visual symbols, garden mapping creates direct temporal-spatial relationship that engages all senses. It maps not just physical landscape but energetic territories where human presence encounters wildness, where memory meets present moment, where past trauma transforms into future nourishment.

I'd like to invite you to consider your own relationship with growing spaces. What memories might be activated by putting your hands in soil? What ancestral knowledge awaits rediscovery through the simple act of tending plants? What cartographies of resistance might you participate in by growing even a single herb in a repurposed container?

If you've found resonance with these explorations, I encourage you to read our previous post in this series, "Charting Freedom: Black Counter-Cartography Under Constraint," which examines additional technologies of navigation and resistance. Next month, we'll continue this journey with "The Cartography of Sound" as we enter Gemini season and explore how auditory practices created alternative mapping systems.

The garden teaches us that resistance need not be grand or dramatic to be effective. Sometimes the most profound revolution begins with a single seed, planted with intention, tended with care, and allowed to grow in its own time. In this patient persistence, we find both the wisdom of our ancestors and the path toward our collective liberation.

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The Leyline Almanac tracks these patterns of earth-based wisdom through its Taurus season pages, creating framework for understanding both historical traditions and contemporary practices. Explore the almanac