Seeds of Change

, 2025

The Mississippi Delta is as much a legend as a place. The historian James Cobb once remarked that even people from elsewhere in Mississippi speak not of “going to” its villages — Clarksdale, Greenwood, Greenville — “but of traveling ‘into the Delta.’” It’s as if you’re transporting yourself into another realm, another era. As if this place — an expanse of flat farmland that stretches for 200 miles along the Mississippi River, from Memphis to Vicksburg — has been frozen in time.

The magisterial white mansions looming over the endless fields. The small villages of ranch homes that appear every hour on the highway. The sunsets turned hazy with chaff. Even the crumbling old juke joints and gas stations, the cracked glass in the storefronts: It can feel as if, if time must move on, then this place is determined to be nothing at all. Drive the back roads and look upon empty lots, seized by vines.

That creeping ruin has become famous, too, as has the Delta’s poverty more generally — the lingering aftereffect of slavery and sharecropping, two wrongs that have never really been redressed. The region is not helped by the fact that the crops grown here — cotton, first, and now corn and soybeans, too — are commodities, rendered into industrial products, often shipped abroad. It’s a stark irony: This is some of the lushest farmland on Earth, and it grows almost no food.

Yet it was here that Amanda Delperdang planted some vegetables — just a little patch of soil, initially, where sad-looking plants plucked from the shelves at Lowe’s perked back to life with just a little tending. Before long, she tore out all the grass in her yard to make one sprawling garden. 

With the enthusiasm of a new convert, Delperdang started dreaming of ways to share earth’s bounty with her neighbors. One day in 2019, while cruising a back road in Greenville, she saw a for-sale sign marking a weedy lot. In the Delta decay, Delperdang saw the chance for something bigger. So she called the realtor and asked to tour the property — to the extent she could.

“It was poison ivy. It was poison ivy above my head,” Delperdang remembers. “So there was no way anybody was going in.” Still, she made an offer, a quarter of what the owner — the city of Greenville — was asking. “I told them, ‘I want to do something for the community,’” she says.

“One of the council people — I’ll never forget — he leaned back in his chair, after I gave my spiel, and he was like, ‘Just give it to her. We’re not using it. We don’t need to even talk about this.’ And the council was like, ‘All right, fine,’” Delperdang says. “So here we are.”

That 30-acre overgrown lot is now home to the Mississippi Delta Nature and Learning Center. Over the last few years, Delperdang has worked with AmeriCorps service members to build a 2-acre children’s playspace — The Heart and Soul Children’s Garden, officially — that includes, among other features, a sandbox, a play fort, and a “sound garden” where, with instruments and recycled detritus, kids can make a joyful ruckus. A trail winding through the garden is edged with native plants; a boardwalk crosses a wetland. This summer, the center’s next phase is beginning: With support from the nonprofit E Pluribus Unum, Delperdang has hired five “garden interns,” teenagers who are planting beans and hot peppers, squash and carrots, plums and apple trees.

The crops look a little “higgly piggly,” as Delperdang says, laughing — because it turns out you shouldn’t assume teenagers know what you mean when you ask them to “plant a row.” Still, make no mistake: This is not just a garden, but a farm, she insists. Per its mission, the Mississippi Delta Nature and Learning Center is “a place that cares for the earth and the people who live here.” Which, despite its seeming simplicity, is a quietly radical reenvisioning of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to growing crops, the center will sell produce, supplying a community that is sorely lacking fresh foods.

In the beginning — before the farm, before the lot, even — Mississippi was a bit of happenstance for Delperdang. She had graduated from Utah State University with an art degree, and, well, what do you do with that? She figured she could get some desk job with a corporation or she could do something meaningful. She discovered the nonprofit Teach For America that placed talented people for two-year stints in high-needs school districts. If you wanted to teach art, well, Mississippi was your choice.

And so, in 2013, Delperdang arrived in Greenville, which, with around 27,000 residents, is still the largest “city” in the Delta. But it’s lost nearly 40 percent of its population over the past three decades. Delperdang concedes that most people don’t drive into Greenville and feel hopeful. But, innocent of preconceptions — “I didn’t know anything about Mississippi,” she says — Delperdang was excited. She was struck by the brightly colored homes — a bit of joy amid a landscape of struggle. And, as it turned out, she took to the difficult work of teaching. She liked that she could serve.

So she stayed at her elementary school for nine years. It helped that she fell in love and got married. With her husband, she bought a house.

The unspoken philosophy in Delperdang’s household, growing up in Utah, had been that going outside — putting your hands in the dirt, in the garden — is an essential part of life. “I don’t think I realized how important that was until I stopped doing it for a while,” she says. Now, with a house, she could plant again, for the first time in years. 

“When I wasn’t teaching, I was learning about plants,” she says. She signed up for an online program in “permaculture,” the science of creating ecosystems that are sustainable and self-sufficient. And she began to appreciate the vital role that native plants could have in supporting the local environment, not to mention the people who live there. 

If her yard-turned-garden was the first prompt, the second came thanks to a fellowship that Teach For America offers to its alumni in Mississippi. Stick around beyond two years and you can earn a graduate degree from Delta State University, plus a stipend. The condition is that you must pursue some social entrepreneurship project. She was looking for opportunities when she came across that for-sale sign.

The name came quickly enough — Delperdang and her husband registered the Mississippi Delta Nature and Learning Center as a nonprofit in early 2020 — but just what the project would entail was still shaping up when the Covid pandemic hit. This only amplified Delperdang’s fears that local kids, despite living amid the green sprawl of the Delta, were losing touch with the outdoors. That alienation, she thought, was contributing to growing anxiety — a mental health crisis. 

Fortunately, the pandemic also prompted a burst of philanthropic giving. The Community Foundation of Washington County launched its largest-ever grantmaking program, which helped Delperdang’s new nonprofit get off the ground.

She broke ground on a small office and welcome center in 2022, and soon afterward connected with AmeriCorps, a federal agency that funds and supports service work and was eager to place some members in the Delta. The day before they arrived, Delperdang worked with the nonprofit Delta Wildlife to tear through the property with a tractor, clearing out the poison ivy. For the first time, she could see the lay of her land. Most of the Delta’s swamps had long ago been drained; her lot, though, contained an intact little wetland.

Over the next three years, a shifting cast of AmeriCorps members tore out invasive species — tallow trees and honeysuckle — and built infrastructure. Today, there’s a looping trail through the children’s garden that is designed to grow more and more wild the further you wander, easing visitors back into nature. On the far side of the parking lot — gravel, intentionally, because the permeable surface allows rainfall to drain — there is another trail that loops through the property’s woods.

From the beginning, though, Delperdang’s vision was to build not just a space where people could see nature, but where they could grow it, too. In 2023, she joined a cohort of Unum Fellows — a program supported by the New Orleans nonprofit E Pluribus Unum, which strengthens local leadership across the South — that was focused on climate and the environment. With the associated funding, Delperdang has launched her “garden intern” program, offering stipends to a group of 14- to 16-year-olds. The goal is to teach young people how to grow food — “and then to empower them to be able to serve their community with that food,” Delperdang says. “So it’s not just you’re growing food, but you’re learning how to grow food in a way that is accessible to others.”

“We’ve been planting, we’ve been weeding,” a 15-year-old intern named Shanyla tells me when I visit. Five years after Delperdang first saw the lot, food is going into the ground.

Delperdang knows the city of Greenville owned the lot for 30 years; before that, someone tried to farm here and eventually just gave the land away. The wetlands pose a big challenge. The soils are another: they’re less dirt than clay, better suited for throwing a pot than planting a tomato. “It’s going to need a lot of time and effort,” Delperdang says. Nonetheless, over three decades, a lot of things will grow wild on an untended plot in the Delta. Delperdang points to a towering pecan tree at the edge of the garden — this, she says, will help them establish an edible forest, where herbs and other native edibles will be planted alongside the natural trees..

When we finish our interview, I walk the trail into that forest; eventually, I find myself standing along a concrete-lined drainage canal that marks the edge of the property. On the far side, a neighboring farm contains row upon row of soybeans, their leaves lush and waxy and green. Here are two visions of Delta greenery, side-by-side — one trim and orderly, the other creeping back toward its ancient form, haphazard and tangled and free.

Full disclosure: I also moved to Mississippi a few years before Delperdang to work for Teach For America (at one point, I managed her future husband, Jon Delperdang, in a part-time capacity; today, he is a full-time educator). I, too, completed a degree at Delta State University through Teach For America’s Graduate Fellows Program. My project was a book about the Mississippi River, which was published last year. I hoped that untangling the famous river’s forgotten history might help people see this landscape anew. While working on that book, I discovered places like this trail along the drainage ditch — the Delta’s feral patches, which unfreeze the terrain and conjure a wider timeline.

The Delta is, really, the Mississippi River’s floodplain. Carved by the river over thousands of years, the full valley stretches as much as ninety miles wide. Deep into the 19th century, most of this terrain was a savage swamp, flooded half the year. Even when it was dry, early settlers had to carry machetes to hack through the vines. A workable river levee was built, finally, beginning in the 1880s. Engineers dredged canals. Timber companies cut down trees. Within 50 years — a geological blink — the place had changed entirely. The farmers arrived in force.

If the Delta feels like it’s frozen in time, perhaps that’s because the region hit its peak 100 years ago. Then the rise of tractors and cropdusters obviated the need for workers; the population began tumbling and never recovered. For those who remained, the agricultural economy offers too few opportunities. By the late 20th century, a federal report declared that “Mississippi and hunger are synonymous in the public mind.” These days, unfortunately, obesity is as much a problem. Most residents live closer to a gas station or a convenience store than a grocery, a fact that shapes what food people eat.

Delperdang approaches this history cautiously; she knows that modern agriculture is important to the Delta. “I don’t want to minimize that,” she says. “I don’t want to minimize the hard work that it takes to do commercial ag.” (She receives funding from, among other groups, an agricultural equipment company.) But commercial ag today, at least here in the Delta, is not producing local food. Delperdang’s training in permaculture taught her to see how so many plants that once thrived here — pawpaw trees and wild plums and muscadines — are now mostly missing. 

“The plants are the beginning of all the things,” she says. “The bugs and the birds and everything have evolved around those plants. When you remove those plants — and this is especially loaded, considering we’re in the Delta, which is probably one of the most altered landscapes in the United States — when you remove those plants, you essentially kill the ecosystem.”

The wild swamps provided sustenance for enslaved laborers and early sharecroppers, so draining them limited the self-sufficiency of local Black populations. In the years since, when Black farmers have managed to get their hands on land, they have often chosen to grow food. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, launched her Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County in 1967, which, by raising crops and pigs, aimed to make Black families self-reliant, freed from the strictures of the Jim Crow economy. 

But Delperdang worries that this tradition may be fading. The interns do, too. “My grandmother, she tries to plant things,” a 15-year-old intern named Markeveon tells me. Lately, though, the matriarch has begun to struggle. “I think I should take that upon myself to help her, but she’s really the only one I know in my family who knows anything, tries to do agriculture."

The garden interns are supervised by Yasmin Veal, a recent graduate from Mississippi Delta Community College who has deep roots in Delta agriculture. “I just come from a family of sharecroppers,” she explains. “So, naturally, ag is just in my background.” But she’s found she prefers tending plants by hand in a garden over what she calls “field work.” She gets to see and touch what she grows. It’s peaceful, she notes.

Markeveon, too, the 15-year-old intern, sees potential here. “I feel like other farms, they’re more of, like — how do I put this? — we’re here to make money too — but I feel like they’re mostly all for the money,” Markeveon says. “We’re doing this for the community.”  

Delperdang’s operation has flourished thanks to the generous input of many organizations. The gardens are sponsored by local and national businesses, including Walmart; the boardwalks were built by an Eagle Scout as his culminating project. The federal government has played a key role, too. Delperdang had been investigating several national programs that might help her expand this year. “None of those exist anymore,” she tells me flatly. Even the AmeriCorps fellowships have been cancelled, and she has to figure out how to proceed without their help.

When I visit the garden, Delperdang makes sure I’m not just a passive observer. She has an intern named Zeke hand me a hoe. He coaches me through weeding, then asks if I want to learn to plant, too. I find myself pressing hot pepper seeds into the clay. Next, Zeke takes me on a tour of the premises — showing off which vegetables he planted, where the bugs are eating too much. My life has been stressful, too, for all the typical, quotidian reasons — bills and deadlines and social obligations. But now I feel a calm settling.

Delperdang had told me earlier that she’d come to see the loss of the AmeriCorps service members as a kind of bittersweet blessing: Federal restrictions kept them from contributing to programs that produce revenue — which meant they couldn’t help grow crops intended for sale. Now she will be forced to give that program more attention. Maybe, she said, she’ll get after the long-simmering intention to plant food-producing plants along the forest trails. That way people can walk through the forest and see new possibilities: how, if you put the right plants back in the ground, you can feed yourself and your family for the next 100 years. “I am a forever optimist of just, like, what’s next? This happened. What’s next?” Delperdang says. 

That means she is focused not on the Delta’s past, but on the world kids are living in today, and the one they will be living in soon.“How can we get them ready for that?” she asks. “The world they’re living in is not their grandparents’ world.” It’s not the Cotton Kingdom, nor is it the ancient river swamps. And it will keep changing — growing up from the soils of that history into something else again.

Kamille D. Whittaker is an Atlanta-based journalist, non-profit newsroom leader, and a professor of journalism and digital media at Clark Atlanta University, where she is the Faculty Adviser for The Panther Newspaper and the Communication Arts Journal. Currently, she is conducting research for Perhaps, To Bloom, a narrative and Africana Digital Humanities project studying the swelling contemporary Caribbean presence in Atlanta and the South. Whittaker was appointed as a Faculty Fellow for the HistoryMakers Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year. Previously, she served as managing editor of Atlanta magazine.

Wes Frazer makes photographs. When he’s not making photographs you may find him swimming in rivers, fly fishing, or playing with his dog, Ralph.