Planting Your Path with Special Guest, Abra Lee

In this conversation, Abra Lee will discuss her garden roots from the dirt-road country of the rural South to a lesson in family history that helped define her life’s purpose. This is a story of failure, persistence, and how takin’ her Mama’s advice to “don’t be no educated fool” led her on a journey to uncover Black America’s legacy in ornamental horticulture.

Abra Lee is an Atlanta-based horticulturalist, speaker, writer, and founder of Conquer the Soil, a platform that combines black garden history and current events to raise awareness of horticulture. Her work seeks to break down the barriers that prevent black people participating in horticulture. She is graduate of Auburn University College of Agriculture and an alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows.

Throughout her career to date in the field of public horticulture – as an extension agent, as a city arborist, as the landscape and horticulture manger and lead at the Atlanta International Airport – she has seen how gardens and landscapes can be places of exclusion for many, places of white privilege and often male white privilege especially at the top levels of management. As she continues in her own career path, Abra aims to continue to help transform horticulture and public horticulture as ever greater places of inclusion and welcome, places where anyone and everyone can and should see themselves reflected and empowered.