Image Credit: Diana Velasquez-munoz
This fall, something pretty special ripened in the IAA Teaching Garden. Alongside the tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, basil, and beans, soft buds of cotton bloomed. Cotton is not your typical crop for a hand-scale, Mid-Atlantic vegetable garden! And yet, student volunteers harvested multiple pounds of fuzzy bolls throughout September and October. It was pretty, but… what were we going to do with it?
This wasn’t just any cotton either. This was an heirloom variety called Arkansas Green Lint. Heirloom varieties are vintage strains of garden plants that have been preserved by seed saving over many generations because of special characteristics – purple potatoes, uniquely-flavored lettuces, culturally significant types of beans. In the case of cotton, heirloom varieties are significant because of their colors and historical importance. Our Arkansas Green Lint cotton was – you guessed it – green! It was historically grown by slaves in their personal gardens, prior to the Civil War. Most cotton used to be pink, yellow, green, or blue in color rather than white. Slaves grew the traditional colorful cottons in their own gardens so that it was easily distinguishable from the white cotton grown on plantations for the market.
Considering the special qualities of this cotton, we put out a call to campus artists: could anyone find a creative way to serve this cotton justice? Enter John Ruppert, professor of sculpture and former chair of the Department of Art at UMD. Professor Ruppert has been identified as the Sandbox Resident Artist at Washington College and is working on a project in collaboration with the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College and the director of the Kent County Arts Council in Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
The group is now turning its attention to “how this cotton could be used as a catalyst for programing… both at the College and in the community,” says Ruppert. At this early stage, the group is considering how art, science, and honoring the legacy of Eastern Shore slaves could be expressed in gardening. Ruppert is considering growing more heirloom cotton in Chestertown.
From its humble beginnings in the IAA Teaching Garden, our cotton harvest is poised to receive a lot of attention! We are thrilled to have grown the inspiration for this interdisciplinary initiative that links the University of Maryland and Washington College – and something that could honor such a culturally significant group of gardeners.
