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| Beronda L. Montgomery (photo: Nicolas T. Kaguri) |
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Beronda L. Montgomery is an award-winning plant biochemist, botanist, professor, researcher, and co-founder of Black Botanists Week. Montgomery's first book, Lessons from Plants, offered insights into what plants can teach us about human behavior. Her second book, When Trees Testify (Holt, January 20, 2026), combines personal experience, familial genealogy, and deep archival research in a profound exploration of the legacy of Black botany across American history.
You are both a botanist and a plant biochemist. Help us non-science types: What's the difference?
I am a plant biochemist, yes, so I use biochemical approaches to understand plant biology. And I think I really leaned into claiming the title of botanist in 2020, when I was a part of a group that co-founded Black Botanist Week. We realized that "botanist" was a much more accessible term. There are gardeners who think of themselves as botanists. Of course there is a discipline of botany, but it seems more accessible, and I'm very open to not feeling that I have to isolate myself into being just a biochemist. I want to be open to interact with people as broadly as possible.
I am always one to say that knowledge is complete in and of itself, but as you know, we have this obsession, as scientists, with kind of verifying things through the Western science lens. I try as many ways as possible to remain accessible to the fact that there's knowledge both within the canon that I learned in graduate school and so much outside of that. You can get knowledge that is life-changing and world-shifting from so many different spaces, not just within the context of what we think of as the accepted path for becoming a plant biologist.
And I experience that. My mother is better at growing houseplants than I am, because she has an intuitive kind of relationship with these plants and an understanding.
As a scientist by background, what kind of historical research did you do for this book?
It's very different from anything I've ever done. It was a fascinating process, because it certainly took me out of my comfort zone as a lab-based plant scientist.
I was in some of the genealogical archives in Arkansas, other archives, in the chapter on apple trees, when I became aware of Harriet Tubman having a love of apple trees. I learned about that through a children's book, An Apple for Harriet Tubman. Then I actually went into the papers for her land, the deed papers, to see what her history had been with those. I was looking at homestead papers and going into archives, doing genealogical work.
A lot of times things you have to do to trace a history of an African American family who was enslaved may be very different, because sometimes you're only looking for ages, and the farm where they were, the plantation. You don't have all the details that you might have otherwise. So it's a very different process, but I think it's important to try to recapture some of those details, because otherwise we keep getting the same stories.
For some of the stories, I really felt compelled to visit the sites. I realized that for this book, in many of the chapters, the listening had to happen in the presence of the space: Blackdom, N.Mex.; Elaine, Ark.; some of the trees in Charleston. That proximity really brought out a lot of different things in this particular book in a new way. These writings and observations had to be place-based for me because I didn't want to just retell history, but to observe where that history had taken us, and to be able to witness and testify to that myself. I talk about the trees testifying, but some of the visits allowed me to have that kind of personal testimony of what it meant to be in that space as well.
It's really important to me that people walk away not just with the science facts. They're going to be there; we're going to learn about plants. But I also wanted to be sure what I had ensconced around it in terms of the history and others for that to be true.
That thread of authenticity comes through in the book in the way you have woven together your personal experiences, your ancestral stories, the context of place, and the science of trees.
I never wanted to write any kind of memoir. But the experience that I was having in thinking about the spaces was so personal that it became important to be open to that.
I really felt, as I was writing this, that I was telling a version of the story that I was uniquely positioned to do. Not that other people couldn't write about these things, but it just all came together in a way that felt like a story that only I could write. I think that's the beauty of being a writer, to find that particular space. It feels like both a privilege and a responsibility.
You talk about the heaviness of some of this writing and research, but you also lift up many moments of joy in When Trees Testify. What have plants taught you about holding that kind of both/and in your work?
I think one of the things that's awe-inspiring to me about plants is the way in which a plant can look so different in a different environment, because the plant is never just in isolation. It is always growing in response to community, in response to external environment. There's always this sense that whatever that plant is to be or not to be, whatever its limitations or opportunities may be, is in community and can't just be an isolationist perspective. Nature reminds us that who we are is in relationship. It's in relationship to who we're with, it's in relationship to the external environment. And isolated and extreme ideas don't give us the place to be in community. At the core of the two books I've written, even though they are very different, is this sense that I am asking questions about who we are in relationship with others, in community, with our past, with our present, and our future, and understanding that nuance and difficult conversations are the key to a joint future.