In Marietta, Georgia, there is a garden with more than four hundred Cherokee plants. Bloodroot for red dye and skin medicine. Wild ginger — present in seventy percent of Cherokee medicinal formulations. Black walnut for food and crafts. Tulip poplar for canoes and shelter. Heirloom vegetables grown from seeds shipped from the Cherokee Nation seed bank.

In Oklahoma.

That’s the verse they teach. A Cherokee elder named Tony Harris planted a garden in Cobb County to preserve his people’s botanical knowledge. The county provided the land — 112 acres at Green Meadows Preserve. The National Park Service provided the designation. Master Gardeners provided five thousand volunteer hours. Fourteen hundred Georgia schoolchildren visit every year. QR codes on every plant. A living classroom.

Here are the verses they don’t sing.

All of Cobb County was Cherokee Nation territory until 1832. That year, Georgia surveyed every acre and distributed it to white settlers through a land lottery. In May 1838, the U.S. Army under General Winfield Scott, aided by the Georgia Militia, went door to door. Within three weeks, eight thousand Georgia Cherokee were rounded up under armed guard. They were marched eight hundred miles west to what is now Oklahoma. Approximately four thousand didn’t survive the walk.

Tony Harris was raised in Oklahoma. His ancestral lineage traces to Forsyth County — the county next to Cobb. He is gardening in his ancestors’ yard.

In April 2025, middle school students from the Cherokee Nation traveled from Oklahoma to visit the garden. They traveled eight hundred miles east. The same eight hundred miles their ancestors were marched west. Same distance. Opposite direction. A hundred and eighty-seven years apart.

The seeds tell the same story in miniature. Cherokee heirloom seeds — carried west during removal, preserved in the Nation’s seed bank across generations — are now planted back in Georgia soil. The seeds went home before most of the people could.

In 2015, the National Park Service designated the Cherokee Garden an interpretive site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The trail that began — in Harris’s words — “at the doorstep of every Cherokee home” now has a garden at one of its starting points. The agency that documents the removal also tends what was removed.

Georgia added tribal history to its public school curriculum. Now fourteen hundred children a year visit the garden to learn the names of Cherokee plants growing in Cherokee soil in what Georgia calls Cobb County and what the Cherokee called home. The state that ran the land lottery teaches its children about the people it lotteried away.

This is not reconciliation. Reconciliation would involve the land. Georgia has not returned an acre. The federal government has not returned an acre. Cobb County — population 773,000 — sits on Cherokee territory and calls it a suburb of Atlanta.

The garden is something smaller than reconciliation and larger than a memorial. It is four hundred plants in soil that remembers what the curriculum forgot for a hundred and eighty years. An elder from Oklahoma kneeling in the dirt his great-grandparents were marched away from. Children learning the names the removal was designed to erase.

Eight hundred miles west, the Cherokee Nation preserved the seeds. Eight hundred miles east, Tony Harris planted them. The distance is the same. The direction is the point.

Sources: ICT News, Atlanta Studies, National Park Service, New Georgia Encyclopedia, Cherokee Phoenix

// NEON BLOOD