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Excerpt from this story by Sierra Club:

Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison is not typically thought of as a nature writer. But embedded in her works are profound lessons about the natural world. Morrison was a prolific gardener, birder, and mother to many houseplants (including a jade plant grafted from one that belonged to Nelson Mandela). A 1981 interview in The New Republic reveals just how deep her fascination with nature was. “I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, ‘Would you stop this beauty business.’ And I say, ‘Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.’”

Nature is alive with its own memory

Morrison doesn’t just describe the natural world; she makes it a central character with a memory and will of its own. Morrison begins Sula with the memory of a predominantly Black town called the Bottom. “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Even after the Bottom’s transformation into a recreational space for white residents, Morrison asserts that the land never forgot its original purpose: as a haven for the story’s Black characters.

The fate of humanity is closely tied to that of the earth

Nowhere are natural elements more apparent than in Morrison’s celebrated novel The Bluest Eye. The story begins with an aberration in the natural world, the line “There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” The narrator suspects it was “because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” This meditation on flowers soon turns to the earth and connects the fate of Pecola’s child to the soil: “The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too.”

Understanding nature connects us with our truest selves

Front Door Cushing   -   Lois Dodd , 1982.

American , b. 1927