The Activist’s Garden: Frances Harper and the Poetry of Growth

This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
September 24, 1825
Devoted cultivators of both gardens and justice, today we honor the birth of one whose pen planted seeds of change across our nation - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, whose legacy blooms as vibrantly as the spring flowers she so beautifully captured in verse.
While history rightfully remembers Harper as a fearless African-American suffragist, social reformer, and abolitionist, we gardeners claim a special connection to her through her occasional, yet profound, observations of nature's grace.
Consider, if you will, her immortal words: "we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity."
How perfectly this philosophy mirrors the garden, where each flower, each leaf, each tender shoot plays its vital role in creating a symphony of life and beauty!
Though her mighty pen was most often wielded in the service of justice, Harper found moments to capture the quiet wisdom of the garden.
In her poem "The Crocuses," she gifts us with these exquisite lines:
Soon a host of lovely flowers
From vales and woodland burst;
But in all that fair procession
The crocuses were first.
What gardener's heart does not leap at these words?
For we know well these brave harbingers of spring, pushing through winter's last frost to herald nature's reawakening.
How fitting that Harper should celebrate the crocus - that most courageous of blooms - she who herself stood as a pioneer, breaking through frozen ground to create pathways for others to follow.
In the garden's perpetual cycle of renewal, she surely found metaphors for the social transformations she championed so eloquently.
As we tend our gardens today, let us remember Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who understood that the principles of growth and renewal apply equally to gardens and to societies.
For in both realms, it takes but one brave soul - like the crocus - to start a magnificent procession toward beauty and justice.