How an Unlikely Friendship Grew in the Garden

As divided as our world seems to be these days, I can tell you first-hand that gardening brings the most unlikely people together as friends.

“If I can’t eat it, I don’t grow it!”

This was a familiar refrain from my friend Sonny. I think I first heard it when I made the blasphemous suggestion that I thought I’d plant some flowers in with my vegetable plants out at my garden plot.

Sonny was the man you needed to talk to if you wanted a garden in the Green Thumb Project, a community garden in Decatur, IL. I met Sonny during my first year as an Extension Educator, in early 2005.

Sonny and I had a very unusual, unlikely friendship if you judged by typical societal norms. Me– a 30-year-old single white woman. Sonny– a 68-year-old married African-American man. Our worlds would have never intersected if it weren’t for gardening. And I’m grateful they did.

That first year as an Educator was quite a whirlwind– part of that included finding out our office (ME, specifically) was going to manage a longstanding community garden project. The founder had passed away and the agency keeping it alive needed someone with more horticulture knowledge to step in.

I had only been an Educator for a few months, and I had no clue about managing a community garden. Then I met the gardeners and I really thought I was doomed.

I remember walking into that first meeting with the Green Thumb gardeners having no idea what to expect. Half a dozen African American men in their sixties or so looked at me, then looked at my (male) Unit Leader also from my office, and talked to him. This was not going well.

My Unit Leader introduced me and I could just feel the doubt oozing from the gardeners. My Unit Leader said something about me teaching gardening classes for the group. No one said a word except one man, who sat back with his arms across his chest and in a long drawl said, “Well, I knows all there is to know about gardening. I have no use for her book learnin’.” That was Sonny– the biggest smart aleck there ever was.

If it weren’t for gardening, Sonny and I would have never been friends. I mean really, what are the chances? Next to nothing. Our worlds couldn’t have been more different.

Over a year after we first met, there was a knock at my office door one morning. It was Sonny. He had brought along a sign we had talked about fixing, but he also brought a bag of frozen green beans from his garden, and a brown bag of roasted peanuts also from his garden. I had never eaten homegrown peanuts before, and they were delicious!

Somehow Sonny appearing on my office doorstep meant I was officially OK in his eyes. I had made the cut.  I was a friend even. He still complained that I was full of too much “book learnin'” and regularly pointed out that he had been gardening “longer than you’ve been on this earth”. But I think he secretly liked playing the role of teacher. And I loved learning from him.

The time I spent out in the Green Thumb Gardens with Sonny were some of my best times in Extension– there was a whole lot of sitting under the old tree next to the garden talking, and a lot of “choppin'”– what Sonny called weeding with his sharpened hoe.

He referred to his hoe as a “midget hoe” since the handle was only about a foot long (Sonny was never one for political correctness). This made it much easier to chop weeds in his preferred crouching or kneeling on one knee position. I tried to crouch like him but I could never do it for more than a few minutes. He did it all day. And he was twice my age!

He made fun of my garden plot on a regular basis. Called it “book learnin'” every chance he got. But when my tomatoes mulched in straw didn’t have near the weed problem his non-mulched tomatoes did in the next row, my mulch mysteriously migrated over to his tomatoes. I asked Sonny if he wanted me to bring some straw out for his tomatoes. His response? “Hell no!” Go figure.

Working with Sonny and Green Thumb, I learned about things like purplehull peas and turnip greens–things not on the menu growing up. One summer afternoon I helped Sonny pick and shell peas. We had a whole wheelbarrow full of shelled peas when we were done.

I asked Sonny how to cook the peas and he looked at me and asked, “What’s a white girl like you wanna know about soul food for?” My response was “Can’t a white girl eat soul food?” He thought for a minute, then said he guessed I was right– so he shared his recipe for peas that included a smoked ham hock– and suggested I substitute bacon since I probably didn’t know what a ham hock was. I did know, but he didn’t believe me.

At some point over the years Sonny started seeing my husband, a family physician, as his doctor. I’m not sure really how that even happened, but my husband always said it was a good day when Sonny was on his schedule. Another unusual, unlikely friendship that wouldn’t have happened were it not for gardening.

I remember one summer my husband had referred Sonny to a specialist for something, and I asked him how his appointment had gone with this new doctor. Cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, Sonny looked at me and said, “Well, Jennifer, you tell your husband that I’m not so sure about what this new doctor wants to do to me. But she is mighty fine to look at. So your husband did good on that.” That was Sonny. Ornery as they come.

I could write Sonny stories all day long. He was full of all sorts of ideas. Like the time he wanted to plant a mile long row of green beans– just to say he did. We had a problem with people stealing from the gardens and I made a sign that said “Danger! Experimental Pesticides in Use”. It was Sonny’s idea to sprinkle the plants with flour for added effect. Our fake pesticides worked for about four years before the thieves figured it out.

Sonny called me out of the blue in January to thank me for the card we had sent him over the holidays. There was more emotion in his voice than I was used to hearing. He told me he was touched that I thought of him. This was not the joking, smart aleck Sonny I knew and loved.

Little did I know that would be our last conversation. Sonny passed away on March 8, 2018.

No more solving of the world’s problems while sitting under the old tree out by the garden. No more poking fun about my “book learnin'”.  No more debates about the best tomato variety.

I’m sad to lose my friend. But without our mutual love of gardening our worlds would have had no reason to intersect. None. That is the unfortunate truth.

Is there someone in your life that you might be able to connect with through gardening? A quiet coworker? A new neighbor? A crabby relative? Gardening just may uncover an unlikely friendship, as it did for me.

If you liked this post, please subscribe to Grounded and Growing today and receive your copy of “15 Tips to Become a '15 Minute Gardener'” so you can spend less time working ON your garden and more time enjoying being IN your garden.! It’s absolutely free. When you join the Grounded and Growing community, you’ll finally take the garden off your “To-Do” list and allow yourself time to enjoy your garden and savor the peace and serenity there. I tell subscribers about new posts as soon as I hit ‘publish’ and send weekly-ish updates on what’s going on in my garden– good, bad AND ugly.

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