Nature, Mental Health, and the City Theme Analysis

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.