In their short waivers, this week we are closing out Black History Month by listening back to a few of our favorite conversations with Black Scientists.

Today, Horticulturist April Lee talks with beloved former shortwave producer Eva Tessvi. Enjoy!

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Sub short waivers, producer Eva Tessvi here. And I'm so excited that it's Black History Month.

And I'm even more excited to share with you what I learned about one of my favorite scientific fields, Horticulture.

The best way I can describe the field of Horticulture is it's a real range like the field of cooking.

So my background is ornamental Horticulture. That's what my degree is in.

So if you think of beautification, making things pretty, the decorative part of plants that is my lane that I drive in, but there's farming, there's botany, landscape architecture, which is a whole other discipline.

April Lee has been a Horticulturalist for about two decades now, but she only started studying the history of it when she became the landscape manager at Hartzfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

She was feeling nervous about it, so she asked her mentor for advice. He told her, you need to learn your garden history.

And so I thought that meant start with the hanging gardens of Babylon in the Bible and then go forward to Spain and California and Southern Horticulture.

But my mom said, no, no, what he means is that you need to know your garden history, Black Garden history, who were the Black Horticultress before you.

Now she is teaching and working on a book called Conquer the Soil, Black America and the Untold Stories of our country's gardeners, farmers and growers.

So today on the show, Abert helps us uncover Black Horticultural history and teaches us about three hidden figures who shaped it.

You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.

So I want to talk about three main people for this episode. And I wanted to start about with someone that you called an eco poet, telling about Effie Lee Newsom.

Effie Lee Newsom is a woman who is a Harlem Renaissance writer and quite possibly, and I believe that she's credited as the first poet who wrote mainly for Black children in the United States.

And this is also a woman who writes for many publications, including the Crisis magazine, which was the official publication of the NAACP and WAB Du Bois is her editor for this magazine.

Wow, that's a lot of Black excellence. So why is her story important to you? Like why did you decide to write about her, share her story with the people that you give talks to?

Well, I share our story with the people I give talks to because one of the things that she is really famous for is using nature as her.

I guess the term that we would use now is as her stance in social justice. So she does things in the poem and the essay that she writes about gladiola garden in the crisis.

And it compares nature to these Black children who are growing up during the Jim Crow era and seeing horrible things happen around them.

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