Happy Earth Day!
This week on Getting Better, Jonathan sits down with plant biologist, author, and educator Dr. Beronda Montgomery for a grounding conversation about nature’s healing power and America’s Black botanical legacy. Together, they explore why reconnecting with green spaces can be so transformative for our mental, emotional, and physical well-being, and how practices like urban gardening and container planting can help us build a more meaningful relationship with the natural world—no sprawling backyard required.
Jonathan and Dr. Montgomery also dig into the deeper wisdom held in landscapes, plants, and history itself—examining interdependence, the ways trees and land can testify to the past, and the often-overlooked contributions of African Americans in botany and agriculture, alongside the foundational knowledge of Indigenous communities. They touch on the significance of willow trees, the meaning of Sankofa, and what it means to look back in order to carry wisdom forward in a powerful episode about healing, remembrance, purpose, and the responsibility of growing a better future together. Dr. Montgomery’s new book When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical History (Henry Holt, 2026) is out now.
BIO: Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery is a writer, science communicator, and researcher. She has spent more than 20 years in higher education, most recently as vice president for academic affairs (2022–2024) and professor of biology (2022–present) at Grinnell College. Montgomery studies how plants and photosynthetic bacteria perceive, respond to, and are impacted by environments in which they exist.
She is the author of Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021) as well as her newest book When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical History (Henry Holt, 2026). Trees stand at the intersection of plant knowledge, Black agricultural history, and collective memories of trauma and triumph intertwined. In When Trees Testify, Montgomery explores the roles that seven tree species—pecan, willow, oak, poplar, mulberry, sycamore, and apple—along with the cotton shrub have played in the lives of Black Americans from their enslavement in the United States to the present. She also explores the science of these plants as well as the sometimes-fraught relationship that African Americans have with agriculture and plants.
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Executive Producer, Chris McClure
Producer, Editor & Engineer is Nathanael McClure
Production support from Chad Hall
Our theme music is also composed by Nathanael McClure.
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