"Touching Grass": Moving away from the keyboard in Dr. Iyengar's Environmental Literature Class

By Sujata Iyengar

The popular mild internet insult, “Go and touch some grass,” directs an overwrought digital correspondent to move away from the keyboard and the screen and to go outside to calm down. This semester Dr. Iyengar’s Environmental Literature students literally touched grass, plants, bark, and mosses; listened to songbirds and frogs; inhaled the fragrance of wallflowers, camellia, tea olive, and magnolia; tasted chocolate mint and sage; and looked at some of Athens’ and UGA’s well-loved on-campus and urban green spaces, such as the UGA Founders’ Garden (the site of the first Garden Club of America), the Trial Garden at UGA (where new and old varieties of decorative plants are bred and tested); the historic Brooklyn Cemetery (where some of Athens’ earliest Black inhabitants rest); and the UGArden (where students grow food to distribute to families in need). Alongside our site visits, we read literature about the natural world from the ancient world to the present day. Classical, Early Modern, and Enlightenment authors we studied included Ovid, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Margaret Cavendish, John Evelyn, and Robert Burns, through whose work we discussed pre-industrial attitudes towards the land. We juxtaposed these texts with two twenty-first-century books, biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (which fuses biology, indigenous knowledge, and social critique) and poet Camille Dungy’s Black Nature (which collects four centuries of African American nature writing and considers how the African American experience of slavery, sharecropping, redlining and other unjust practices alters attitudes towards and writing about the land).

 Students journaled regularly about the literature they were reading and the visits they were making, integrating their reflections with literary analysis. The class participated in two service projects, the first an Environmental Humanities Symposium with faculty from UGA and from Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France (and, via Zoom, with French graduate students), the second a creative and research-focused service-learning project commemorating the recent acquisition of two nineteenth-century marble statues of the classical deities Flora and Bacchus by the UGA Founders’ Garden. In four groups named after Springtime deities from around the world – Persephone, Osiris, Freya, and Brigid – students wrote, edited, drew, printed, and in one case hand-bound booklets to gift to the Founders’ Garden and place in the Garden Club room.

Echoing Francis Bacon’s famous aphorism, “God Almighty first planted a garden,” junior Grace Elder concluded about the class: “Humans can learn to take care of living things by having a garden. Beautiful things need to exist. Beautiful things make us happy. Beautiful things deserve to flourish. The act of standing in a garden can calm the mind in ways that no virtual outlet can.”

Student Reflections

Ashley Beresch

What a gift to receive a tour of the Brooklyn Cemetery from Ms. Linda Davis. Walking through the grounds on a sunny winter day, our Environmental Literature class was given a wonderfully thorough guide of the Cemetery’s past and present. The tour encouraged us to more closely examine local histories and environments (especially those at risk of being lost or obscured due to systemic neglect) and consider more deeply how land and life are entwined. This important piece of Athens is rightfully transforming thanks to the hard work of Ms. Davis and others’ activism. Not only are they working to reverently preserve and honor the resting grounds as a historical site, they are considerate of and caring for the land itself. Ms. Davis and The Friends of the Brooklyn Cemetery welcome a future where heritage, history, and environment can each be respected, restored, and preserved in harmony. 

Anonymous

The UGA Trial Garden provided unique insight on the commercial business of gardening. Opposed to smaller food production operations such as the UGARDEN, the Trial Garden tour presented a glimpse into the struggles of growing plants for buyers with specific aesthetic tastes in a rapidly changing climate and limited green space.  

Grace Elder

At my trip to the UGA Trial Gardens I enjoyed admiring the plants and learning about the history of the garden and how it is taken care of today. The fact that the ornamental garden has to fight to not be a parking lot is saddening. Ornamental gardens do not have to be tossed to the side just because they do not provide food. They do provide nourishment to the soul. The plants feed our minds with colorful images of nature. We can see life grow in front of our eyes. Humans can learn to take care of living things by having a garden. Beautiful things need to exist. Beautiful things make us happy. Beautiful things deserve to flourish. The act of standing in a garden can calm the mind in ways that no virtual outlet can.  

Mary Katherine

The UGA Trial Gardens was a very special and interesting experience for me. I always appreciate any sort of farming or gardening and having it truly in the middle of our campus is so amazing and I find a great deal of appreciation in being able to find myself in the middle of carefully curated and taken care of plants and the insects that accompany them whenever I want to. Just walking around and seeing the garden beds is such a beautiful representation of the possibilities that come from available gardening space. Walking directly from the brutalist and industrial space of the parking garage to the open garden helped me recognize that plants and nature can be found anywhere and everywhere. Learning about the people in control who insist that the garden continue to exist, rather than being turned into a concrete lot or building, gives me a lot of pride in our school and hope for the continuation of natural spaces being accessible. The greenhouse was also so beautiful to me; the earthy smells, humid air, and rows and rows of plants are truly one of the most special things on our campus. I have always loved plants for both house and garden and learning about the propagation, planting, and watering efforts that go into producing them is amazing to me. I also find it so special that this greenhouse has been in existence for as many years as it as. It reminds me of how many people have enjoyed and put energy into the beauty and learning that occurs on our campus as well as learning about how these efforts continue to live on. I am truly so thankful to have a class that gave me the opportunity and encouragement to experience this beautiful and inspiring space.