In a world obsessed with quick fixes, my grandmother’s garden taught me that true healing is slow, intentional, and rooted in ancestral wisdom. Her weathered hands didn’t just grow plants—they nurtured the kind of medicine that mends generations.
How My Grandmother’s Garden Taught Me About Healing
The First Lesson Beneath the Soil
The first time I saw my grandmother cry, I was seven years old, barefoot in her backyard garden while she knelt between rows of bitter leaf and scent leaf. Her tears mixed with the red earth beneath her knees.
“Nne, what’s wrong?” I asked, fumbling in my limited Igbo—language slipping through my fingers thanks to English classrooms and American cartoons.
She looked up, her face streaked with soil and sorrow, and said something that took me twenty years to understand:
“This garden is not just growing food, my child. It’s growing medicine for wounds that haven’t healed yet.”
At the time, I thought she meant stomach aches or fevers. I didn’t know she was talking about heartbreaks, migrations, buried traumas, and the slow ache of forgetting who you are.
The Inheritance of Healing
My grandmother, Mama Adunni, didn’t believe in coincidences. She believed in seasons. In cycles. In the way pain and healing moved through families like tides—sometimes overwhelming, sometimes gentle, but always present.
Her garden wasn’t just sustenance. It was a sanctuary. A pharmacy. A place where silence spoke volumes and healing began long before you realized something was broken.
Every plant had a story. Every story had a purpose.
The bitter leaf was for disappointments too sharp for words. The scent leaf reminded us that joy could still grow in weary soil. The towering palms bore witness to generational conversations—the kind that only happen when hands are busy and hearts are open.
I was a child caught between two worlds. One where my grandmother spoke in proverbs and plant wisdom. Another where my parents spoke in career milestones and educational metrics. I wanted to belong to both, yet felt like I understood neither.
The Medicine We Don’t Name
Growing up in post-colonial Nigeria, I learned quickly: there were hierarchies of knowledge. Western medicine was “real.” Traditional healing? “Just culture”—ritual, maybe, but not science.
Mama Adunni never argued this point. She simply kept brewing her teas.
When I began to suffer from chronic stomach issues in my teens, my parents carted me to specialists across Lagos. CT scans. Bloodwork. Antacids. Anxiety meds.
Mama Adunni said nothing—just handed me cups of ginger root, turmeric, and moringa leaf.
“The body remembers what the mind tries to forget,” she’d say.
“Sometimes the medicine is not in the pill. Sometimes it’s in the story the plant tells your body.”
I rolled my eyes, desperate for relief, not riddles.
But the teas worked. Slowly. Gently. Without side effects. My stomach settled. My sleep deepened. The gnawing tightness in my chest began to ease.
And in that process, something profound shifted:
I began to understand healing not as the fixing of broken things, but as the remembering of what is whole.
Decolonizing Wellness
Years later, I moved to New York—and found myself surrounded by wellness culture. Turmeric lattes at $10 a cup. Smudge sticks and “ancestral healing” workshops for hundreds of dollars. Superfoods, rebranded. Traditions, commodified.
Practices I had once seen dismissed as “primitive” were now trendy. Except, somehow, they no longer belonged to us.
This wasn’t just cultural appropriation. It was epistemic erasure.
Colonialism didn’t just take land. It took language. It took trust—in our bodies, our elders, our remedies. Then it turned around and sold them back to us at a premium.
Mama Adunni never needed a lab to validate her wisdom. Her every harvest was a soft rebellion. Her every cup of tea a radical act of remembering. The slow boiling of roots and leaves was her way of saying: Our medicine is enough.
The Wisdom of Slow Medicine
The older I get, the more I understand what she was teaching me. What I now call slow medicine.
The kind that doesn’t offer instant results but promises something far more sacred: lasting change.
In her garden, nothing happened fast. Seeds took weeks to sprout. Leaves took months to mature. Trees took seasons to fruit. But once they did—they sustained generations.
This is the kind of healing our dopamine-driven, productivity-worshipping world forgets. That some things aren’t meant to be hurried. That the most powerful changes often happen underground—quiet, unseen, steady.
When I began my own garden last year—a few pots on a Brooklyn fire escape—I understood her in a way I never had before.
Each time I watered those stubborn plants, I wasn’t just hoping for basil. I was remembering to be patient. To show up daily. To trust in unseen growth.
The Garden as Legacy
Mama Adunni passed three years ago. But her garden is still there—thriving. My cousin tends it now, still brewing teas, still believing in the power of bitter leaves and soft rituals.
That garden is more than a garden. It’s a living archive. A grassroots resistance. A classroom in intergenerational wisdom.
It reminds me that healing doesn’t always mean adding something new. Sometimes, it’s about returning—to what your body already knows, to what your grandmother taught you, to the earth that raised you.
Now, when I visit home, I find myself drawn to the soil. I listen. I weed. I plant. And I realize that the garden was never just about food. It was always about memory. Community. Restoration.
Cultivating Our Own Medicine
Today, the world feels more broken than ever. Burnout is global. Grief is collective. And so many of us are searching for something—anything—that might make us feel whole again.
I’ve been that person, clutching self-help books and supplement bottles, hoping for rescue.
But now I know: true healing is slow. It is daily. It is inconvenient. But it is ours.
What my grandmother planted wasn’t just crops—it was a worldview. One that invites us to tend instead of rush. To nourish instead of numb. To honor the rhythms of healing that don’t obey deadlines or algorithms.
Maybe that’s what she meant when she said the garden was growing medicine for wounds that hadn’t opened yet. She was growing for me. For us. For every generation trying to remember where it hurts—and how to heal.
Reflection Prompt
What are you growing in your own garden—literal or metaphorical?
What healing practices from your lineage have you dismissed as “just culture”?
How might we all benefit from slowing down our approach to wellness?
Share your own stories of healing passed down through generations in the comments below. What traditions shaped your wellness journey? Tag a friend who needs to hear this, and follow @africlout for more stories rooted in culture, wisdom, and soul.
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