Plant People: Episode 9

The African American Garden

Plant People—a new podcast from NYBG and PRX Productions featuring NYBG’s CEO & President, Jennifer Bernstein—connects the dots between nature and humanity through lively conversations with plant scientists and curators, gardeners and naturalists, and other experts. In this week’s episode, we’re joined by renowned culinary historian, author, and NYBG Trustee Dr. Jessica B. Harris, curator of the African American Garden. Over the last three years, she’s used this important collection at NYBG to tell, through plants, the stories of migration, dispossession, and reclamation that inform so much of the African American experience—and define much of what American cuisine is today. As we take a stroll through the space, come hear about the ways the African diaspora has, over the course of more than 500 years, transformed the Western Hemisphere with its cultures, labor, and agricultural know-how.