America Grows
Garfield Park Conservatory Panel Discussion
Wednesday, July 8
6 – 7:30 p.m.
Garfield Park Conservatory
Wednesday, July 8
6 – 7:30 p.m.
Garfield Park Conservatory
Gardens tell stories far beyond what’s planted in the soil. They hold memory, tradition, survival, creativity, and care passed across generations.
Join the Chicago Botanic Garden for a conversation exploring the deep connections between Black American history, land, food, and community in the Midwest and Chicago.
As the Garden marks 250 years of gardening in the U.S., this conversation explores the many ways Black communities have shaped gardening, food traditions, and relationships to land across generations. From Southern agricultural knowledge carried north during the Great Migration to present-day urban farming and food access work in Chicago, the panel will trace how gardens have long served as spaces of nourishment, creativity, resilience, and community.
Featuring a scholar, a Chicago-based urban agriculture leader, and a culinary cultural voice, the discussion brings together history, lived experience, and contemporary community work to explore:
- the agricultural knowledge and cooperative traditions rooted in Black communities
- the role of gardens and urban agriculture in creating access, connection, and neighborhood care
- the ways food traditions preserve memory, culture, and celebration across generation
Together, the panel will reflect on what it means to cultivate belonging through land, food, and community, and how Black gardening traditions continue to shape the cultural life of cities like Chicago today.
Tequia Burt (Moderator)
Tequia Burt is a Chicago-based writer and gardener, and the co-founder and chief strategist of The B2B Influence Lab, a modern media and marketing studio. A longtime journalist and former editorial leader at LinkedIn, she has spent her career shaping how brands communicate through research-driven storytelling and thought leadership.
Outside of her professional work, Tequia is an avid gardener whose practice explores the connections between land, food, and culture. Her work in and around the garden reflects a deep interest in storytelling, history, and the role of growing in Black communities.
Dr. Monica White (Panelist)
Dr. Monica M. White is a Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Her work explores Black agricultural traditions, cooperative farming, and food sovereignty, with a focus on how communities use land to build resilience and self-determination.
Angela Taylor (Panelist)
Angela Taylor is the wellness director at the Garfield Park Community Council and a longtime steward of the Fulton Street Flower and Vegetable Garden, which she has managed for more than 20 years. Through her work with the Garfield Park Garden Network, she supports community gardening, food access, and neighborhood wellness, using land as a space for connection and care.
Chef Fresh Roberson (Panelist)
An Eastern North Carolina native and grandchild of sharecroppers, Chef Fresh Roberson (they/she) is the Farming Chef and founder of Fresher Together, a food and farming project dedicated to healing, restorative hospitality, and collective liberation.
Fresh’s work is a modern reclamation of Black Southern agrarian legacies, cultivated through their regenerative, diversified veggie, herb, and heritage grain farm. By bridging a background in systems-design with over twenty years of global culinary expertise, Fresh centers the joy of ancestral connection to build community belonging and "edible activism," ensuring our people and our land thrive together. They are dedicated to building a future where land access and connection to the earth are permanent sources of community joy and healing.