The Day Our Languages Met

BDA gardener uses a wooden dibber to punch identical holes into the beds.

Under the opaque wind tunnel, the team was protected from the patter of the rain. We were planting. As if in a well-timed line dance, Rojas led the procession, using a wooden dibber to punch identical holes into the beds. Barbara and Jade followed close behind, laying out the adolescent plants in close proximity to the divots before their final placement in the ground. In their seamless teamwork, the virgin ground was quickly populated with little tufts of green growth.

Our farm is located in Uniontown, AL, a town nestled roughly an hour and a half from the closest big city. Its mother county, Perry, is home to less than 10,000 residents. Despite what images and assumptions such a description conjures, our team, notably in the garden, plays host to people from all over. On this particular day, each of our teammates represented three different backgrounds and with that three different languages.

Seamless teamwork laying adolescent plants in perfect rows.

The team made small talk as they worked their way down the row of beds. The conversation found its way to the language of the garden, namely for two of the vegetables: lettuce and frisée.

Frisée, which often is worked into spring mixes, is an endive, a family of bitter, leafed vegetables. It’s distinct for its muted green and yellow shaggy leaves, which could pass as a produce pom-pom.

Looking at the plant, Jade, one of our Horseshoe Farm fellows, proclaimed, “This might be silly, but frisée always reminds of frizzy, both because of the look and of the name. I wonder if that is where it comes from.”

At this, Barbara, a French national, added her credibility to the thought, “Jade, you might be right; frisée in French means curly.”

Hand tools are still primary method of gardening at BDA.

“I’ve often thought about the same thing for lettuce,” Rojas said. “You know how when you break lettuce you get a milky substance? Well, in Spanish, leche means milk. I always thought the roots were probably the same. Lettuce sounds like leche.”

“Ah, yes!” replied Barbara. “It’s similar in French. Milk is “lait,” which though spelled with ‘ai’, is pronounced like the first three letters of lettuce – ‘let’”.

Though everyone was in arm’s reach of internet search, no one broke the bond of the moment. Each person committed to this team discovery, contributing where they could and listening when unsure.

For the next few minutes, the team continued to explore other names, deciding which characteristics could lead to the naming and how that theory played out against their native tongue.

By the time the planting was done, we had grown not just land, but a better collective understanding of who we are together.