Gardens in the Dunes

Set in the American Southwest and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel follows Indigo and Sister Salt, two young sisters from the Sand Lizard people, a small, nearly extinct Indigenous group, as they are separated by the U.S. government's campaign to suppress Indigenous peoples and forced onto divergent paths before eventually reuniting.

The Sand Lizard people have lived for generations at the old gardens, ancient terraced plots in the sand dunes originally planted, according to their origin stories, by the ancestor Sand Lizard herself. Indigo and Sister Salt live there with their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, and their mother, Mama. Grandma Fleet teaches them desert survival and Sand Lizard customs. Their family's history is one of relentless dispossession: Grandma Fleet's husband was killed by gold prospectors, Mama was held captive at Fort Yuma and later impregnated by a Presbyterian missionary, and the few remaining Sand Lizard people have scattered.

The family's fragile stability ends when they join a Ghost Dance gathering near the railroad town of Needles, California. Hundreds of Indians from various tribes dance for four nights, following the teachings of Wovoka, a Paiute prophet who met the Messiah and was told that continuous dancing would summon storms to restore the Earth and return the ancestors. On the final night, the Messiah and his family appear at dawn. Soldiers and Indian police raid the encampment. Grandma Fleet tells the girls to flee to the old gardens. Mama escapes northward, following the Messiah's tracks into the mountains, and is not seen again.

The sisters survive at the old gardens under Grandma Fleet's guidance, but the old woman weakens and dies beside apricot seedlings she planted. Hoping to find news of Mama, the girls travel to the homestead of Mrs. Van Wagnen, an old Mormon friend of Grandma Fleet's, only to find it destroyed. That night, Indian police capture them. The authorities hold Sister Salt at the Parker reservation along the Colorado River, while Indigo is sent to the Sherman Institute, a government Indian boarding school in Riverside, California.

At the boarding school, Indigo rebels and runs away, taking refuge on the nearby estate of Edward Palmer, a botanist, and his new wife, Hattie, where Edward's pet monkey, Linnaeus, finds her. Hattie is a former graduate student whose thesis on the female spiritual principle in the early church was rejected by Harvard Divinity School; she experienced a nervous collapse compounded by a sexual assault from a classmate. She married Edward, a much older man entangled in debt from a disastrous orchid-collecting expedition in Brazil. Hattie bonds with Indigo and refuses to return her to the school.

Edward receives a commission to travel to Corsica to collect cuttings of Citrus medica, the citron tree, which would settle the lawsuit from his failed expedition. Hattie insists Indigo come along, and Edward agrees, recognizing the child helps them appear as innocent tourists. Susan James, Edward's wealthy sister, gives Indigo a green parrot. On the cross-country train, Indigo tries to jump off at Needles to find her family but Hattie catches her.

In England, they visit Hattie's great-aunt Bronwyn near Bath, an eccentric elderly woman who keeps sacred white cattle and tends ancient stones in her garden. One night Hattie sleepwalks into the stone garden and perceives a luminous, prismatic glow, filling her with inexplicable joy. At the standing stones of Stanton Drew, Indigo sings a Ghost Dance song, certain the Messiah has passed through this place. In Italy, they stay with Laura, a friend of Aunt Bronwyn's who hybridizes gladiolus near Lucca. Laura's black gladiolus garden, filled with terra-cotta figures of snake-headed mothers and bird-masked women, deeply moves Hattie. Indigo receives generous packets of gladiolus seeds and corms.

In Corsica, Edward has secretly received cablegrams revoking his authorization but proceeds anyway. While villagers argue over a miraculous image on a schoolhouse wall, he slips into the citron groves and cuts dozens of twig specimens. Indigo and Hattie witness the wall glow with iridescent light; Indigo sees the forms of dancers and feels overwhelming joy. Edward sees nothing. Back in Livorno, customs officials discover the cuttings and cablegrams. Edward is arrested. Laura posts bond for his release and returns the parrot Rainbow, whom Indigo had lost during the trip. Hattie, realizing Edward used her and Indigo as cover for smuggling, tells him the marriage is over.

In a parallel narrative, Sister Salt endures life at the Parker reservation, where she befriends Maytha and Vedna, twin Chemehuevi-Laguna sisters. Together they start a laundry business at a dam construction site on the Colorado River. Sister Salt becomes the lover of Big Candy, the site's enormous Black cook. Following Sand Lizard customs, she also has relations with other men. She becomes pregnant and gives birth prematurely, alone in a desert wash. The tiny infant, whom she calls the little black grandfather for his stern, ancient demeanor, survives despite Big Candy's refusal to acknowledge him.

A Yaqui woman named Delena arrives with trained black dogs whose circus draws a huge crowd. The show is a diversion: under cover of the riot, Delena empties a buried safe containing the savings of Big Candy, his boss, construction superintendent Mr. Wylie, and Sister Salt. Delena flees south to buy rifles for an indigenous uprising in Mexico. Candy pursues her into the desert and nearly dies of thirst but never recovers the money.

On the return voyage, Hattie and Edward agree to separate. Edward plans to sell orchid hybrids and partner with Dr. William Gates, an Australian doctor he befriended on the voyage to Italy, at a meteor crater mine in Arizona. Hattie takes Indigo to Arizona, where they find Sister Salt with the twins at Road's End on the Colorado River. The sisters are joyfully reunited.

Edward falls ill at the meteor crater site and dies in an Albuquerque hospital. Hattie discovers his overdrafts have nearly depleted her inheritance. Returning to Needles with supplies for Indigo, she is attacked on the road, beaten, robbed, and sexually assaulted. Indians find and care for her at their encampment, where a four-night Ghost Dance is under way. Hattie's father arrives to take her home, but she escapes. Discovering meteor irons at a livery stable that connect its owners to her attack, she sets fire to the building. The flames spread to half the town.

The sisters attend the Ghost Dance gathering near Needles, dancing all four nights. Before dawn on the fourth morning, Indigo climbs a high sandy hill and hears a song in the Sand Lizard language about little clouds dancing with their sisters the fog and brothers the mist. She feels Mama rocking and kissing her and understands where Mama is and always will be.

The sisters return to the old gardens. Strangers have killed the old rattlesnake at the spring and chopped down Grandma Fleet's apricot trees, but green shoots grow from one stump. Indigo plants the gladiolus corms she carried from Italy throughout the terraced gardens, interspersing bright swaths of color among the corn, beans, and sunflowers. A letter arrives from Hattie, now in England with Aunt Bronwyn. The twins visit with orchid plants and news that Indigo's gladiolus at Road's End have become peace offerings decorating their neighbors' church. The novel closes with images of renewal: the little black grandfather toddles after Linnaeus the monkey; Rainbow the parrot flies above them; a daughter of the old rattlesnake has moved into the spring; and from the stump of Grandma Fleet's destroyed apricot tree, green leafy shoots are growing.