This blog post is part of the ESC Summer Fellowship 2025 series. These fellowships provided funding for research projects related to the environment, sustainability and/or the Climate Action Plan. This post was written by Zoe Wilson, one the fellows of this past summer cycle.
Hello everyone! My name is Zoe Wilson and I am here to tell you about my summer in the wonderful company of the Hoop House (HH). I was granted a fellowship with the Environmental Stewardship Center to work at the Hoop House and complete my SIP about community gardening. My days began early, slowly waking up during the joyride on my bike to the HH, quickly followed by a duel with the bugs that eagerly greet me when I enter the garden. My work often involved rehoming weeds to the ever-inviting compost piles, planting new life in the form of vegetable seeds, and living out my interior decorator dreams as I organized the garden and shed in a way that maximized floor space and highlighted my color scheme of dirt brown and lush green. The summer got off to a rocky start with the sweltering heat that triggered my survival instincts as the amount of sweat that erupted from my skin led me to believe I was under water. Nevertheless, as sure as the dirt under my fingernails, I too was ever-present and hard to get rid of.
Alongside my gardening work, I was working on my SIP, titled “Sowing sovereignty: Decolonial approaches to community gardening and environmental justice.” Through scholarly review, personal reflections, and practical application, I explored how gardens can be powerful spaces for healing, care, resistance, and liberation within communities. I drew from works in decolonial theory, Indigenous studies, feminist theory, and environmental justice scholarship to analyze how land-based practices resist settler colonial paradigms and create space for community self-determination. Being immersed in the garden allowed to observe firsthand how theoretical frameworks are embodied in physical labor and community interactions. Working in this space, I learned accountability, knowing that not just people but the plants were relying on me, as well as the importance of forming a relationship to the land and acknowledging nature, not as a resource, but as the basis of all life. The simple act of sharing the bounty of the Hoop House with my friends and community taught me of the subtle yet vital ways people take care of one another and how a cucumber is more than a cucumber; it is a symbol of life, resilience, and love.
The garden taught me that resistance does not have to be loud. Sometimes, it looks like growing food where concrete once stood or eating a tomato that you held as a seed. Sometimes, it looks like showing up, again and again, to tend to something fragile.
This fellowship was more than just a summer job or reserach opportunity—it was a reminder that change can start small, in a seed, in a patch of earth, in community.
I want to thank everyone who helped me this summer: my friends, my family, my work-family—Lee, Greta, Sara, and Chloe, the Larry Bell ’80 Environmental Stewardship Center, and of course, the land that allowed me to build this wonderful relationship and create this beautiful life.
Environmental Stewardship Center
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