Tending the Vines
Black Abundance in Eight Plants
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Tending the Vines
Pre-order for $23.99
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Ashia S. Ajani
About this listen
In Tending the Vines, Ashia S. Ajani illuminates how eight unique plants tell the story of the Black diaspora in America. Each chapter is a deep dive into one plant—including eucalyptus, passionflower, wild mustard, and kudzu—exploring their significance in African tradition, their role through the Middle Passage and Chattel Slavery, and their enduring importance in modern households and communities.
Tending the Vines unpacks the complex rhetorical lives of these plants, most of which have been used as both ugly metaphors for Black incursion as well as powerful symbols for Black liberation. It also highlights the ethnobotanical uses that have sustained displaced populations for centuries. Throughout, Ajani complicates our notions of “invasive” and belonging, by contextualizing how plants move, are moved, and, of course, move us.
Critic Reviews
"A much-needed perspective on the thorny question of native and non-native, Tending the Vines is a carefully woven, lyrical meditation on the nature of belonging in a world built on legacies of exclusion."—Jenny Odell, author of Saving Time
“Tending the Vines announces the arrival of a bold new voice in environmental writing. Ashia S. Ajani gives us a new understanding of often maligned plants, while drawing thrilling connections between Black ecological pasts and the path to a greener future. In the tradition of black feminist writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, Tending the Vines draws upon the world of plants to reimagine Black life – our history, our trauma, our joy, and our liberation.”—Lindsey Stewart, author of The Conjuring of America
"With eight plants, Tending the Vines weaves a lush ethnobotanical tapestry that enriches the canon of Black ecologies. Ashia S. Ajani's bardic prose offers a generous and necessary antidote to the white settler imaginary."—Myriam Gurba, author of Poppy State
“Ashia S. Ajani composes expert stories of overlooked nature: marginalized human communities, invasive species, native weeds, and the “uncharismatic.” In doing so, she gives her readers a fresh and memorable opportunity to know both human beings as nature alongside various forms of plant life. As a self-described “eco-griot and amateur historian,” Ajani inhabits the crossroads of “imagination and ancestral memory” and equips us with a rigorous vision of our environmental past, present, and future. With writing that artfully details stories of communion and estrangement among humans and plants, Ajani moves across expansive, contested, and necessary terrain.”—Kimberly Ruffin, Ph.D., author of Black on Earth: African American Eco-Literary Traditions
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