Films

Blanche Epps: In the Garden of Gethsemane
(1991)

“Green is the master color from which all the other colors come,” states this dynamic gardener, whose reflections upon the aesthetic, therapeutic, historical, practical, economic and social meanings of urban gardening are at the heart of this show. Mrs. Epps grew up in North Carolina and migrated to Philadelphia after World War II. (She “didn’t have an ache or a pain until she hit this pavement,” she says). Practicing heritage gardening, seed saving, canning—and teaching history, common sense, African American and Native American heritage, and “basic survival skills”—Mrs. Epps passes on a sense of how to “undormacize” peoples’ home-grown and handed-down knowledge to fellow gardeners, children, kin, and neighbors.

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