Gardening and Community Theme Analysis

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.