This garden in Dearborn, Michigan carries the memory of a community’s Arab ancestors
Al-Hadiqa, a heritage garden in Dearborn, Michigan blooms with stories of the Arab diaspora.
Atop the Arab American National Museum, the installation showcases Middle Eastern plants, each symbolizing connections to the communities that inspired its creation. Through this ancestral practice, gardening becomes a living form of expression and resistance, showcasing the artistry and skill of collaboration. Projects like Al-Hadiqa demonstrate that we can arrive at mastery through both the individual and the collective.
One of Lujine Nasralla’s fondest memories is processing mulukhiyya at her grandmother’s house with her family. The dark leafy green plant is often made into a stew originating from Egypt called mulukhiyya.
“I remember sitting on a bedsheet and a group of us would pick the leaves off the stem. Then you wash them, dry them, or mince it and use it in a stew,” Nasralla said. “It’s definitely a communal effort, but I love those labor-intensive activities.”
In the summer of 2020 when the city of Dearborn, Michigan was shut down due to COVID-19, residents were scrambling to find mulukhiyya. So when Nasralla traveled from Dearborn to Palestine in 2023, she brought back some of its seeds. Several of those seeds have now grown into full-scale plants at the Arab American National Museum’s (AANM) heritage garden Al-Hadiqa.
Al-Hadiqa (الحديقة), which means “the garden” in Arabic, contains plants, vegetables and herbs from Arab countries. Specialties like Aleppo peppers from Syria, Iraqi heart tomatoes, Armenian cucumbers, za’atar and figs. Marigolds and calendula also flower alongside native Michigan plants like butterfly weed and bee balm.
Dearborn has one of the highest concentrations of Arab Americans in the country and the AANM is the first and only museum in the U.S. dedicated to Arab American stories. The museum opened Al-Hadiqa on its roof in 2023 as a testament to the resiliency of Arabs living in diaspora and the diversity of Arab culture.
“It’s showing people the ancestral practices that Arab people have nurtured and continued here . . . many of us do come from backgrounds where our grandparents were farmers,” Fatima Al-Rasool, public programming coordinator for AANM said.
“Also, something that we really teach at the museum is, yes, we are Arab and that is something that unites us but we also all have our different cultures within each country. People recognize a lot of these plants, but they all use them in different ways. So, you’re seeing the diversity of Arab experiences.”
Many of the vegetables and flowers growing at Al-Hadiqa were donated by community members as seeds they brought back from Arab countries like Nasralla’s mulukhiyya, or transplants from their own garden. The garden beds are accompanied by photos of Dearborn residents who donated seeds and excepts of 10 oral histories the museum collected about their connection to gardening as an ancestral practice.
Shatha Najim, the AANM’s community historian, collected the oral histories. She said for many Arab Americans living in Dearborn, tending to plants from their lineage keeps them connected to their homeland.
“It’s about memory. It’s about making roots and establishing a place for yourself here in this new land that you have to adjust to . . .
. . . Especially within the local community here, there’s a lot of recent immigrants, so think about moving your whole life literally from one continent to another, one country to another,” Najim said. “Gardening is such a big part of our lives in the Middle East, and for some it’s on a bigger scale like farming, actually growing all of your food . . . It’s a way to really feel at home by bringing what you know, doing what you know, and connecting with nature on land that way.”
Fatima’s mother, Zeinab Al-Rasool, donated purslane seeds given to her by her mother in Iraq. Her photo with a QR code to listen to her family’s history sits underneath thriving tomatoes and butterfly weed.
Born in Basra, Iraq, her father came from a family of farmers. She recalls in her early years that her family would cook whatever they harvested from the farm for lunch and dinner until the war between Iraq and Iran forced them to move from the village. Though they moved to a bigger city with less land, her father continued to garden, planting leafy greens and date trees. Eventually, Zeinab got married and moved her family to Jordan and then the United States.
Fatima also remembers gardening being a “family affair” when she was growing up.
“My parents made us work when we were kids,” she laughs. “My dad would always have us digging holes and digging trenches to plant stuff . . . But it was always fun because we were always doing it as a family . . . A lot of my uncles and aunts always gardened and my parents and them always exchanged plants as gifts. My uncle is actually a date farmer in California now. They moved there a few years ago and before they left they gave my mom a lot of their jasmine flowers that they had been growing in their home in Michigan as a parting gift.”
The installation also hosts things like an environmental stewardship apprenticeship for high schoolers, garden-to-table cooking demos, poetry and music open mics, arts and crafts classes, and bring-your-instrument jam sessions. At these events, plant/seed swaps and volunteer days, the museum gives away the fruits of its garden labor.
“People are learning where our plants come from, and the foods that we eat every day,” Al-Rasool said. “What does that look like when it’s growing? And there’s such a community practice in tending to your plants, coming together to create the foods through those plants that you’ve grown and harvested.”
The plants growing in Al-Hadiqa carry the memory of the community’s Arab ancestors as they moved through diaspora. Here, gardening is a form of ancestor veneration as Dearborn’s Arab community waters the seeds of memory that carry their traditions to new soil.
All photos by Houssam Mchaimech, from the AANM Flickr account.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer.
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