NYBG Opens The African American Garden | Diaspora: Same Boat Different Stops

This past weekend, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) opened the African American Garden | Diaspora: Same Boat Different Stops. Curated by Jessica B. Harris, Ph.D., America’s leading scholar of the foods of the African Diaspora, the garden highlights the plants and gardening traditions that are at the heart of the experiences and histories of people from Africa in the Americas. It will be on view through October 2024. 

Now in its third year, the African American Garden is a three-year collaboration between scholars and local artists to celebrate the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas through the lens of plants and food, presented at NYBG’s Edible Academy, in the Barnsley Beds, a sequence of eight vegetable garden beds arranged in a semi-circle. Starting with an orientation center, some of the beds explore plants from different regions—South America, the Caribbean and Central America, and North America—while others spotlight their uses for medicinal remedies, creativity, and economic value. The final bed is a recreation of a sugarcane field, an important plantation crop throughout the tropical parts of the Americas, driving the forced removal, relocation, and brutal enslavement of millions of Africans.

In 2022, African American Garden: Remembrance & Resilience gave a curated view of the diverse world of African Americans and their foodways in the context of the United States from rice, okra, and other grains and greens to cotton, tobacco, indigo, watercress, and licorice root. For 2023, African American Garden: The Caribbean Experience featured more than 140 plant varieties highlighting the plants and gardening histories that are essential contributions to Afro-Caribbean foodways, including those that have been brought to the U.S. by Caribbean immigrants.

Dr. Harris, an NYBG Trustee, has written 12 critically acclaimed books on the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora, including High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, and was recently inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Hall of Fame. To create the African American Garden, she worked with historians, heritage seed collectors, and NYBG’s Edible Academy staff to replant and reinterpret the Barnsley Beds, turning them into a living archive that documents African American food and farming histories, as plants and people travel to new places, including the Bronx.

“Here in these eight beds, you will find stories of resilience and resistance, modification and migration, remembrance, reverence, and hemisphere-wide connection told through the plants of our world,” said Dr. Harris. “The words ‘Same Boat Different Stops’ speak to the links shared by all of African descent…Over our more than 500 years as inhabitants of this hemisphere, we have with our cultures, labor, and agricultural know-how, transformed it. This garden celebrates our presence here in all of its forms.”

The African American Garden is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Photography courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.

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