This TED Talk features artist Tobacco Brown recorded live at TED Residency 2017.

At age four, I found a garden, living underneath the kitchen floor.

It was hiding behind leftover patches of linoleum on the worn-out floor my mother was having removed.

The workman was busy when the garden caught my attention.

My eyes became glued to the patterns of embroidered roses

blooming across my childhood landscape.

I saw them and felt a sense of joy and adventure.

This excitement felt like a feeling to go forward into something I knew nothing about.

My passion and connection to garden started at that exact moment.

When spring arrived, I ran so fast through the house speeding ahead of my mother's

voice. I pulled on my red corduroy jumper and my gray plaid wool hat before my mother could get her

jacket on. I catapulted out at the front screen door and threw myself on a fresh carpet of grass.

Excited, I bounced to my feet and flipped three more cartwheels

before landing by her side.

Mother dear was in the garden, busy breaking up the soil,

and I sat beside her playing with mud pies in the flower bed.

When her work was done, she rewarded me with an ice-cold glass of bittersweet lemonade

and then lined my shoes with sprigs of mint to cool off my feet.

My mother cooked with the colors and textures of her garden. She baked yams and squash and

heirloom tomatoes and carrots. She fed love to a generation of people with purple hull pease and greens.

It seems that during my childhood,

the blooms from my mother's gardens have healed

...