When I was a youngster, our nearest neighbor's front yard was decked out with a huge tire, painted white and filled with flowers.  A metal glider and chairs, also painted white, stood nearby under the shade of a large catalpa, just waiting for a visitor to come by and sit for a spell.  There were flowers --- nearly all annuals that were easy to grow from seed, like marigolds and cockscomb --- and a blooming bush.  Across the yard was a pen of chickens, then the barn, and in the other direction was the vegetable garden, laid out in straight rows.  The couple clearly spent considerable time, though little money, keeping their yard in impeccable shape.

Although my neighbors were white, their space could have graced the pages of Richard Westmacott's African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South, with the notable lack of a hog butchering station and a swept dirt floor.  Westmacott analyzed the yards of  47 rural families spread across Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, focusing on folks who had reached or passed middle age.  If there was such a thing as a traditional Southern, African-American garden, he wanted to find it.

And he did see similarities, many noted in my opening paragraph.  Rather than being showcased landscapes, the yards were subsistence gardens where work and leisure intermingled.  In most cases, the yard had become an extension of the house, the spot for a family barbecue or hog butchering session.

But where did the similarities come from?  Could they be traced back to the families' heritage in western Africa, to their slave background, or were the similarities simply the common byproduct of being poor in the South?

This post is part of our African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South African roots of current African-American gardens Keeping pigs and chickens for self-sufficiency Influences of poverty on African-American gardens African-American gardens are extensive

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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