I haven’t always been a “tending the witch’s garden” kind of witch. In fact, I would call it a more recent development.

This is my second year tending a full garden. While I gardened when I was younger and grew up in gardens and farms, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life tending pots and indoor plants to varying success. None of that has compared to the experience of tending a full garden and the lived wisdom that I’ve developed doing it, even in just this past year.

Most of my land kinship was developed on the land where I grew up. This place remains deeply meaningful and important to me, but I don’t return there often, and where I live is different. They’re on opposite sides of the Appalachian, which is a natural ecosystemic barrier. I characterize my love for and experience with the Appalachians by my life lived on either side of them. The soil, the trees and forests, the crops, the plants and animals, the insects are often different–not so much that you’d notice on a glance, but materially.

These days I live in the Piedmont. I started my deepest animist work as a dirt witch, and the difference in soil is the most dramatic to me. I grew up in coal country. The soil is what I know now is alfisol, a term I only learned in adulthood; I knew it then by its thickness, its moisture, its rich darkness, and the tight way roots would pack it. The soil where I learned to look at soil is rocky, so rocky it’s hard to grow any real crops on it without a lot of effort, and often coal-laden; I remember walking through the mud barefoot and coming back with the soles of my feet completely black.

Here, where I live now, the soil is mostly ultisol, a bright red clay soil. Where it isn’t clay, it’s sandy. Many of the forests I’ve been through have a clear divide between the canopy of deep-rooting trees and the underbrush of shallow-rooted ferns and grasses, plants that thrive on this kind of dirt. The two soils have a very different character: to support the ecosystem, yes, but also to look at, to hold, to smell, to walk on. They have their own unique histories.

This is something I think about a lot. Soil is the fulcrum point between rot and new growth, and it carries the histories of the living and dead within it. When I think of developing a relationship with the land, I don’t think of plants or animals first but the soil itself.