Solitary Gardens is the soil from which Freedom to Grow bloomed. The project is an outgrowth of The House That Herman Built, jackie sumell’s seminal 12-year creative partnership with her beloved elder Herman Wallace, who spent 41 years in solitary confinement in the state of Louisiana. Together, they designed a dream house for Herman - and illuminated both the terror of solitary confinement, and the power of the imagination. When Herman’s passed just three days after his release, jackie returned to his first request for his home: “I can clearly see the gardens they will be full of gloxinia, delphiniums and roses and I wish for guests to be able to smile and walk through gardens all year round”

In the disorienting wake of grief, so began Solitary Gardens, an abolitionist-driven art project that pairs incarcerated “Solitary Gardeners” with volunteers to design garden beds in the footprint of a 6’x9’ solitary confinement cell. 

Solitary Gardens animate the possibility of a prison-free landscape through plant-powered decomposition of the cells. The plants and “revolutionary mortar” ultimately overcome the garden bed’s structure, providing a visual deconstruction of the solitary confinement cell. So, when building Solitary Gardens, we transform what were America’s most lucrative chattel cash crops into a holistic outcome. The process allows us to reconcile our violent past with the implications on the present and collectively construct a very different future. The Solitary Gardens both directly and metaphorically ask us to imagine a landscape without prisons.

Solitary Gardens are grown across the country - in New Orleans, this includes the first bed built in the Abolitionist's Sanctuary in the Seventh Ward; our garden grown in collaboration with Obie Weathers at the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action and The Solitary Gardens at 2600 Andry St in the Lower Nine. We have established partnerships with folks from Oakland to Philadelphia to Houston, growing with incarcerated loved ones from their own communities.

This is an open-source project. We encourage others to connect with us to establish a Solitary Garden in their community. For more information on this project, visit solitarygardens.org.