Putting Down Roots: How Our Gardens Showcase American Diversity

E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. It's the American promise stamped on the Great Seal, the idea that has defined — and at times bedeviled — our American experiment. But if you want to see that promise brought to life, you need only look at our gardens. They are, at their roots, a melting-pot story — a reminder that the beauty of a backyard, like that of this country, comes from the diversity of the people who made it. 

Whether Indigenous people or those from Japan, Jamaica, or elsewhere, our ancestors have put their stamp on today’s gardens. Their influence has almost always been about centering food, family, and memory. It magically keeps what was left behind close, adding meaningful layers to the story of our shared heritage.

The Africans who were forcibly brought to America through the transatlantic slave trade created tiny garden plots on slivers of land outside their lodgings. There, they cultivated okra, watermelon, sorghum, rice, millet, and yams, growing additional food for their families and sometimes getting paid for it (Thomas Jefferson paid his slave Bagwell Granger $20 for more than 60 pounds of hops). 

Spiritual tradition showed up in those gardens as well: the practice of beckoning to spirits, rooted in West African mysticism. Trees and vessels were carefully placed on a property to invite ancestors and benevolent presences to share their good fortune. Drive through the South today, and you’ll spot many bottle trees, which have bottles — especially cobalt blue ones — slipped over branches. West Africans believed these could capture malevolent spirits and keep them from entering the home. The tradition was preserved in the Gullah/Geechee communities of the Carolina Lowcountry, and the blue bottle trees have long since become one of the most beloved forms of Southern folk art and garden ornament.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many people from Japan moved to California, bringing a deeply refined aesthetic tradition with them. They built some of the most important Japanese gardens in the country — ones that would go on to shape American tastes for generations. Tragically, a number of those gardeners were forcibly removed to internment camps during World War II, and their gardens were partly destroyed.

But their legacy endured. Today, gently rolling berms, wandering stone paths, manicured evergreen plantings, and the introduction of soothing water elements, stone cairns, and wooden bridges are as familiar in American suburban backyards as the apple tree. These gardens also demonstrated that gardening was a deeply rewarding aesthetic pursuit, an idea that definitely took root.

We owe a different but equally enduring debt to those who came to the U.S. from Italy and Greece, bringing the spirit of the Mediterranean into the cramped backyards of American cities in the late 1800s. In New York, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, the grape arbor became an institution — a rough-hewn wooden structure draped in vines that provided shade, fruit, and a reason to linger outdoors with family on a summer evening. In Astoria, Queens, NY, it is still said that roughly a third of the homes show Italian descent, not by their architecture but by their yards, where one fig tree — more often two — stand as a kind of living identity marker. Tomatoes, fennel, and basil filled out these urban plots, and religious statuary — a Madonna, a saint — was placed among them, understood to bless the harvest and keep the household safe.

The garden tradition of the American Southwest tells perhaps the most layered story of all. The indigenous Pueblo people, more than a thousand years ago, created plazas, courtyards, terraces, and ritual landscape features — outdoor spaces that were communal, ordered, and deeply tied to the rhythms of agriculture and ceremony. 

When the Spanish colonizers arrived in the area, they brought gardens molded by centuries of cultural exchange, tracing back to North Africa and Spain under Moorish influence, with tilework and babbling fountains. In Mexico, these traditions merged with indigenous food-growing practices, especially those involving chiles, herbs, and vegetables. In the American Southwest, all of this merged. Colorful walls, clay planters, and a central fountain melded to create an outdoor room meant not to be admired from afar but truly lived in — a spirit that still shapes today’s outdoor kitchens and gathering spaces.

For centuries, people from the Caribbean (Bahamians and Cubans among them) arrived in Florida, bringing with them tropical fruit trees — tamarind, mango, guava, and sour orange — along with an array of brightly colored exotic ornamentals and hard-won techniques for coaxing gardens from coastal sand and rocky soil. From this practice, coral rock gardens became a signature of South Florida. They’re a form of landscape architecture in which the porous limestone is carved, stacked, and shaped into walls, raised beds, and pathways with an organic, almost sculptural beauty. It’s a unique and popular “only in Florida” effect.

America's gardens, it turns out, are as diverse and layered as its people — each patch of ground a quiet record of who arrived, what they carried, and what they refused to leave behind.