By Melinda Heigel, NC State Extension Master GardenerSM volunteer of Durham County
At this year’s free and family-friendly 2026 Plant Festival “Gardening Across Generations” on Saturday, March 28, we’ll be hosting a “Sharing Family Garden Stories” table. There you can record your own oral history (bring your mobile phone to use as a recording device) or interview a family member or friend who is with you about their own stories about gardening. Capture some family lore, funny tall tales, or poignant stories about gardening. You’ll come away with a recording to pass down through the generations. We’ll have questions and people on hand to help you conduct your interview.
Read on to hear how a family’s gardening stories impacted one of our Extension Master GardenerSM volunteers.
Telling stories is a uniquely human endeavor: it is by humans, for humans, and about humans. The oral tradition transcends time and place: it happens in virtually every culture. From a scholar’s point of view, multi-generational stories provide valuable information from folks who don’t always get to write history. Generational storytelling allows us to understand the perspectives of all historical actors. It’s like the mortar that fills in the gaps of the brick walls of history, binding pieces together to build a more complete whole.
From a personal perspective, hearing memories from your grandparents, parents, and even members of your “found family,” helps pass down traditions and values. It gives you a window onto your own worldview and opens up channels for empathy, understanding, and shared experiences. It preserves family history and provides context. Ultimately, oral history is about relationships.
Like many Extension Master Gardener volunteers, I came to love plants by way of family stories passed down like precious keepsakes and through the experience of getting my hands dirty with both kith and kin. Growing up in Gastonia, NC, in the 1970s and 80s, I was not only surround by noisy cotton mill dinosaurs taking their lasts gasps, but by people who were tied to the land through plants. Despite their “city” lifestyle as mill workers (many of whom had retired by the time I came along), gardening was a way of life: once how you earned your living, how you literally put bread on the table, and how you found joy.
My Great Aunt Ruby and her husband, Uncle Pete, (my surrogate grandparents) constantly regaled me with their stories of life on the land before becoming childhood mill workers. Before he came to work in the textile mill around age 10, my Uncle Pete told stories of the “32-hour days” in Big Lick, NC, he and his tenant-farming family spent in the cotton fields. He described cotton sacks he’d strap on–longer than he was tall–and drag down the rows during picking time. He recalled how badly his hands hurt as a kid each night after picking 100 pounds of cotton a day. That might be hyperbole, but no doubt he put in long days of manual labor starting at a tender age. While that sounds horrible to our modern ears, he told me stories of the fun he and his siblings had in the fields and riding to town in a buggy on top of all that cotton to weigh and sell it.
(Left) While not a photo of my great uncle, this 10-year-old Oklahoma child and he were about the same age when Lewis Hine took this photo in 1913. It brings his stories to life, and helps me imagine him in an NC field harvesting cotton on a late fall day. (Right) My Uncle Pete, by then an experienced mill hand as young teen, working with fellas known as “The Dirty Dozen.” (Image credit: National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Hine, Lewis Wickes, photographer; Melinda Heigel)
Throughout the mill village community, listening to the stories of elder retired workers (in their 70s or older by that time) and helping them in their gardens connected me to their past and their present. As a small kid, I would “visit” from house to house on the Clara, Dunn, and Armstrong (CDA) mill village with people who came from the country for the promise of steadier, if industrial, lives. Many grew and “put up” (a vintage term for preserving like canning and freezing) fruits and vegetables like their life depended on it. Now I understand at points in their history, it did. Life on the land, especially as a tenant farmer, and later as an urban mill hand, could be lean. A devastating drought could wreck cash crops like cotton, events like mill shutdowns, and even busts like the Great Depression meant that gardening got you through the hard times.
I recall hot summer mornings helping neighbor Dovey Robinson in her vegetable and flower garden. She’d sit in a chair and explain the whys and hows of hoeing rows to her young charge and remind me she was excelling at that same job when she was 5 years old, or half my age. She shared proud stories of growing food for her family and not having to spend her hard-earned wages at the company store.
She encouraged me to chew on some mint while I worked to keep me energized as she had done as a tyke. She told me that her family grew herbs not just for cooking but for putting in little bags (known as an asphidity bag) that hung around their necks to ease symptoms of cold and flu. And she often sent me home to my aunt and uncle with an armful of produce and some stems of the world’s most glorious cut flowers.
An example of Dovey Robinson’s asphidity (also know as asafetida) bag her mother would fill will pungent herbs they grew on their land. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the scent (think perhaps a take on modern-day Vic’s VapoRub) was thought to ease symptoms of respiratory illness. While families like Mrs. Robinson’s made their bags at home from simple fabric or flour sacks, manufactured ones were also available in the early 20th century in pharmacies. (Image credit: South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum, University of South Dakota.)
I also spent my summers tending our own vegetable garden with my uncle, aunt, and mom. We gardened on mill-owned land, but, to be sure, we took great pride in that patch of dirt. Early mornings were not for sleeping in. Just like they did as kids, I joined them in walking out to the garden with buckets of water and metal drinking dippers to water our crops. No fancy hoses or irrigation to be had. We used rags from the cotton mill to stake our tomatoes (think today’s upcycling) and saved paper sacks from the grocery store to harvest our produce. I remember many happy evenings we’d sit together shelling peas and telling old family stories while we worked. I can still hear the sound of the crisp string beans as they snapped and fell into the paper bags.
Connections to growing things were not always about your own survival. The ability to share your tomatoes, okra, and your loads of squash underscored the power of community in a mill town like Gastonia. Despite sometimes tough working and living conditions, or perhaps because of them, people understood the importance of mutual aid. Sharing your abundance meant everyone in close urban quarters were all the better for it. And growing both food and flowers allowed mill workers to remain in touch with the rhythms of their rural roots despite becoming urban denizens.
Growing food was one thing, but in this sometimes-hardscrabble world, flowers equaled joy. My mom, who grew up on the CDA mill village living hand-to-mouth, lost her mom when she was only 5. She liked to tell me she and her 5 siblings were “raised by committee.” Sparing you the details of her upbringing, suffice it to say so many of her neighbors provided her the love, education, and support she didn’t often get at home.
She had an especially impactful relationship with one woman she called Mama Mann (the name my mom chose to call her says it all). Now Mama Mann kept an immaculate house and had a wondrous garden full of flowers. One day walking home from school, my mom struck up a conversation with Mama Mann about her flowers and the rest was history. This beautiful urban oasis was intriguing to my mom and became her escape. Mama Mann taught my mom everything she knew about flowers and opened up a world of delight for a troubled young girl.
(Left to right) My mom, Anna White Henderson, as a girl at her home on the CDA mill village in Gastonia, NC. My mom always had rose campion (Silene coronaria) growing in her yard. It was a plant Mama Mann, her neighbor and gardening mentor, religiously grew. I, too, have included this old-fashioned self-seeder in my landscape as an homage to their story. My mom doing Mama Mann proud in her own landscape in the late 1980s. (Image credit: Melinda Heigel)
Decades later, my mom told me that Mama Mann gave her hope. This woman, who was part of what we would often call “chosen family,” taught my mom that regardless of circumstance, growing flowers and investing your energy in floriculture could bring feelings of purpose and happiness. It didn’t take much to grow and collect from seeds, and hard work definitely paid off. While this sounds like some trite, dusty proverb, the love and care Mama Mann showered upon her flowers and by extension, on my mom, changed Mom’s trajectory forever. My mother grew beautiful flowers her whole adult life. And she passed down those stories of Mama Mann’s flowers to me, encouraging me to become a gardener, too.
I am still sharing with found family in the garden. Here I am with my dear friend Perry, who is teaching me about growing sunflowers, cover crops, and vegetable gardening on land his family has tended for generations–and ironically just a stone’s throw from the original birthplace of my Uncle Pete. (Image credit: Jonathan Heigel)
These gardening stories continue to ring in my ears, even now as a fifty-something-year-old woman. They provide a through line to my family’s history over the last century and inform my future. They ground me in an ongoing shared love of the natural world. And they remind me of valuable lessons I learned about caring for both plants and people. My story is but one of many. We look forward to hearing yours at the upcoming Plant Festival!
Resources and Additional Information
Annual Plant Festival, “Gardening Across Generations” Saturday, March 28, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, Durham Co. Extension Office, 721 Foster St, Durham. Join Extension Master Gardener volunteers of Durham County for a morning of learning, discovery, and hands-on exploration. At this free event which is open to all ages, you’ll find demos on composting, pollinator and bird-friendly habitats; Master Gardener volunteer experts available to answer gardening questions; previews of plants that will be featured in annual sale in April; family-friendly activities and opportunities to explore local garden resources and partners. Learn more here.
Some questions to ask your own friends and family to learn how plants have shaped their lived experience. We’ll have these questions and more at the upcoming Plant Festival.
- What is your first memory of plants or gardening?
- Was there someone or something that made you interested in gardening? How old were you?
- Did your grandparents, parents, or found family garden? Describe what gardening was like for them.
- Do you have any plants that are sentimental to you? Have a special significance in your culture or family traditions? If yes, why?
- What has gardening taught you?
- What do you like to grow and tend?
- What has been your biggest challenge in gardening?
- Do you have a favorite gardening memory or story?
- What has been your biggest triumph in growing plants?
- Do you have a favorite tool or way of doing things in the garden?
Read more stories and memories about gardening that connect families on our blog.
From Extension Master Gardener volunteer Wendy Diaz: “My Favorite Houseplant: African Violet” s://wp.me/p2nIr1-3dX
From Extension Master Gardener volunteer Jennifer Van Brunt: “Finding Common Ground: A Gardening Legacy” https://wp.me/p2nIr1-6eN
Article Short Link: https://wp.me/p2nIr1-794