Roots and Rituals: Our Sacred Family Garden
words by Charity Warren, art by Mariam Seshan
We used to have this big, cherished backyard at our old house. My mom and dad could just barely afford it, but they wanted my brothers and I to have somewhere safe to play that wasn’t in the street or at the giant ‘Christmas tree’ down the street.
But we were always a close-knit family, so when Grandma's house got too crowded, we barely moved—we began to live in the house across the street from Grandma’s place. This house had a respectable backyard, but I could tell that my mom and dad dreamt of more than that—they envisioned a space where we could cultivate not just plants, but memories and traditions. Dad was a country boy from Dinwiddie who spent his summers on his Grandma B’s farm—he loved farming and wanted to give us a space that would echo the joy he experienced tending to his family's farm.
So, we moved again—further but not too far. This time, it was a modest brown house that wouldn’t turn many heads, but that backyard. Oh, it was grand, lush—with a yard that hilled into a green lake where the sun became a million twinkles dancing on the surface. The yard laid like a valley in between towering trees that stood around as a fortress to this private oasis. In this beautiful yard, Dad decided to start a garden.
Gardening became our ritual—each Saturday or Sunday morning, we would first hear birds singing outside, then my mothers singing. I remember waking up early to my mom in the kitchen making breakfast. The music from the porch stereo would fill the house, and I remember being embarrassed as Musiq Soulchild threatened to wake the whole neighborhood with his voice. In those days, I just wanted us to fit into the new neighborhood—to grow similarly to everyone else.
But then I would hear the way my mom would sing as she finished up breakfast and began to re-pot the houseplants—I saw how alive her spirit was, singing her favorite songs in her kitchen. With every word, she was celebrating life, our new home, our security, our garden—a testimony she shared with the whole block. Dad would circle the house from the back to front and back again, his hands perpetually stained with the soil that he so lovingly tended—or full of tools from early morning tending. He would hum along to the tunes emanating from our kitchen, a quiet participant in my mother’s gospel-like morning symphony. With every weekend morning starting off like this, I slowly realized that we were not meant to grow like everyone else. We were flowers that soaked in the sounds of R&B and Soul music, and danced with our roots instead of planting them. Some mornings, as I sat on the stairs and watched my mom and dad choreograph a dance of domesticity and devotion to our little plot of land, I could feel it growing into our sanctuary of love and growth.
The garden became a canvas for us to visualize our stories and sow the seeds of our future, and we all had to contribute to our piece of Earth. Me and my brothers took turns pulling weeds, planting seeds and flowers, tilling and fertilizing. In the rhythm of our labor, we discovered a profound sense of connection—to each other, to the earth, and to the timeless cycle of life and renewal. With each seed planted we infused a piece of ourselves into the very fabric of our home and with each weed pulled, we protected and cared for the garden much as our mother and father did for us, forging a legacy of resilience and love.
We went to church less in those days. While I did not know if there was a God, those early mornings in our backyard, communing with nature, communing with my family, was the closest I felt to something divine. As we kneeled to pull weeds and dig holes for the plants, we bowed to our living altar. Every seed we planted and every time we watered our garden felt as if we were planting our own prayers to grow. And with every picked strawberry and tomato, we saw our prayers come to fruition. We all gathered the produce when it was time.
You’d think we’d hate it, waking up early on the weekend to do lawn work. You’d think we’d get tired of the mundane, steadily rowing and tilling, patiently planting seeds and paying attention to the schedules of plants and pulling weeds. But we never did. We would go to the store or market and pick out the flowers for the season—always remembering to get a mixture of perennials and annuals because we wanted what we loved to come back to us if it left, but we also could accept that some things were not meant to return.
This work meant something to all of us but for Dad, I think it was particularly holy. I remember the stories he would tell us about living with his grandmother during the summer in the boonies of Virginia. His grandmother was a freed slave from Maryland who knew all too well about farming. She taught my father how to grow crops, but more importantly, she taught him the value of growing your own food from the Earth. I guess this is why he wanted us to have the garden, he understood the value of having a place with good roots and a good foundation. I remember how much dedication he put into his garden—carving out the soil and carefully laying seeds. He knew all the tricks, what season to plant the watermelons, and how to perfectly place the sticks in the ground for the tomato vines.
Through working the garden with him, my mother and my four brothers, I began to see more than the beauty in plotting vibrant flowers in the front of our house. I began to see the testimony rooted in growing our own food, on our own land. This was the place that we could call home, where we could feel safe. Much like how my mother and grandmother tended our house plants, they tended us children. They made us adaptable, unafraid to ground ourselves in new spaces and grow like we belonged—because we did belong.
The garden bloomed for many years, but over time, we got busier. We went to college, we focused on work, and soon, the family's routine work in the garden stopped. Then Dad stopped working on the garden, and soon after, we moved out of that modest, brown house with good roots and a good foundation. On our last day, I walked around the back to see what was once a garden, now a tomb. Maybe the land will become someone else's garden, someone else’s sanctuary, someone else’s tomb. But the lessons are still our own, and the memories still belong to us. Just as some crops and flowers must die during a season to become reborn again, our garden continues elsewhere—it now lives in the plants that I have in my college apartment, the plants at Grandma’s house, and the plants on the table in our new place.
What will never die and will only grow is the learned value of tending to the Earth—seeking to grow with and learn from nature, even if we do not understand it. My parents passed that sense of value down to us in many ways—we were given the same dirt-stained hands as our father, and the same unwavering spirit and passion as our mother. They passed this knowledge on so that wherever we settled, we would sow pieces of ourselves and our heritage, into the land, and grow as we saw fit. This was my family’s way of memorializing the past as we stepped into our new life. As we make our testimony and send prayers through the land—we become both the reapers and sowers of our legacy.
As the years passed and life's demands shifted our focus, the memories of our cherished backyard and the lessons learned through our family's garden remained etched in our hearts. We carry forward the values of stewardship and connection to the Earth instilled by our parents, nurturing not just plants, but the bonds of love and heritage. In every seed planted and every flower tended, we honor the past while embracing the journey ahead, weaving our family's story into the tapestry of life with each new chapter.
