I grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the ‘land of peaches and cream.’ When I was six and lived on Lemon Avenue, Celia moved in down the road. We both had black hair, but my skin was white and hers was brown, an inheritance of different migration paths. Celia and I carved desire lines through the dusty almond orchards between our homes for playdates. One picture in my mother’s family photo album shows the two of us “fishing” in puddles, our sticks tied only with string, beaming as if we’d hooked whales.  

One of the most vivid memories of my childhood was not captured on film.  

It happened one summer evening. I followed Celia into the dairy barn where she lived with her siblings, mother, and a father I never saw. In a makeshift kitchen on a concrete floor, I found her mother stirring a steaming pot of pinto beans and massaging white balls of dough in her hands. I watched, mesmerised, as over and over she flipped the flattened disks on a grill over a small open fire. Celia’s mother smiled at me—I did not yet speak Spanish—then handed me what she had been making—a warm burrito. It was the most delicious comfort food a child of six could want.  

The memory remained. Celia did not. 

Our friendship in those Lemon Avenue days was an annual flower that blossomed only a year. I did not then know why but she left. Years later I would more fully understand that her parents were two of the million Mexican migrant workers harvesting California crops in the vast valley of home. 

Every now and then, I hunger to know how Celia’s life unfolded and how she and her family were shaped by nature, place, and migration. 

I also wonder how it felt to pick those peaches, irrigate those rows of crops, and butcher animals in factories day-in-and-day-out. My sense of place was shaped as an Edenic one by the stability of my parents, a teacher and a nurse. The land my father cultivated was only garden, a place we can choose to be, a source of wonder, renewal, and joy for him and later for me, and not one of hard manual labour.

Later when I went to university in the nearby San Francisco Bay Area, I became interested in the way the literature of nature and place reveals our relationships with the natural world. Yet in the early 1990s, nearly everything I read was written by able-bodied white men. When I returned home to the valley’s fields and orchards, I always wondered, Where are the Black and brown voices telling stories of their own experiences here and beyond in the natural world? What can I learn from people doing this back-breaking work? Where are voices of women in this world and beyond? Gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and physical abilities are important prisms through which to understand how people access and experience the natural world. They were all missing from my understanding of the world.

Decades later, I wrote Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (2020) as a travelogue and rebellion against the invisibilities in conservation, nature writing, and more. In one essay, I invite readers to consider, “If you are white, a poplar tree in a park may look innocuous—an innocent object of beauty. Imagine if you are unable to reach it over a rocky trail. If you are disabled and cannot access its shade or touch its leaves, how might your relationship to the tree change? If you are Black, that same tree may have a more sinister feel, perhaps a symbol of lynching’s legacy.”

Naturally, when asked to contextualise The Transformation of Colour, the timely film and documentary project by British-Trinidadian artist Bryony Benge-Abbott, personal and professional experience would shape how I would view it.

On a warm and sunny September afternoon, I met Bryony in Meanwhile Gardens in London where the film debuts in October during Black History Month. We were surrounded by vines of plumping pumpkins climbing the garden’s brick walls and profusions of pink fuchsias, burgundy roses, and jaunty yellow yarrow. Encircling the garden was rosemary, an iconic plant of remembrance. The garden felt like an embrace. It was then a week before the world would hear of the murder by police of the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini and the subsequent revolts by young women, schoolgirls, and young men, too, across Iran who refused to be silent, who defiantly cut their hair, who burned their hijabs, and who were in real time becoming agents of change. 

But there in the quiet refuge of Meanwhile Garden, the world was bathed the golden light of early autumn and hint of possibility. I listened as Bryony shared her vision for this public art project for young people of colour, particularly women and girls.

“Having the space to share women’s perspectives and experiences of the landscape is vital,” Bryony said as orange Peacock butterflies flitted onto blooming Calendula flowers. “Audiences need to be reminded that such diverse voices have been marginalised for centuries. This space provides the chrysalis to reflect upon the impact of this on our current situation.”

The situation?

Poles are melting, sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying. Biodiversity is plummeting and weather systems grow more erratic. Sewage pours into British rivers. Pollution disproportionately impacts urban residents from minority and ethnic backgrounds who have less than a tenth of the green spaces than their white counterparts. 

The voices in the film will embolden young people of colour to be part of the change. Listen closely to the seven stories of Global Majority women who work in natural history, conservation, and the outdoors. 

What do they speak of?

They speak of the need for human connection and diversity in the countryside.

They speak of their desire to make the world a better place and the colonial and scientific side of natural history curation. 

They speak of their love of gardens, nature, and their communities. 

They speak of the erroneous notion that Black and Brown people are not interested in the outdoor life; the echo chambers in organisational structures; the need for repatriation and representation in natural history collections.

They speak of decolonising narratives and the importance of acknowledging “other ways of being, knowing, and perceiving that have long been excluded from mainstream Western knowledge bases”, in the words of Jini Reddy.

They speak of addressing intersectional representations in the outdoor sector—visible and invisible disabilities; sexuality and gender identities; age; different body types; and race and ethnicity.

And when they speak, we may wonder about the ‘ignition points’ in each of their lives that started their journeys as maverick change-makers. What they say is important individually. Yet what they say together has collective power to inspire young people to act for nature and conservation. 

As Bryony and I moved through the gardens, another butterfly—a yellow Brimstone—appeared in the distance.  It wasn’t easy to see as the garden is big, the butterfly small. Yet there it was! A powerful concept in a delicate creature, one that creates the central metaphor of change in The Transformation of Colour. Of course, it will be after the first frost that the film makes its debut in London. Butterflies will not then be seen much, if at all. That does not mean they are not around. They will be hiding and hibernating between tree bark and under leafy debris, a vital life force and metaphor for young people ready to play a role in nature and conservation. 

Take a moment to connect with the space when you’re in Meanwhile Gardens. Run your hands through the rosemary and let this fragrance of remembrance help fix the film’s message in your mind: within everyone is a chrysalis waiting to transform—the self, society, and the natural world.