The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (12 page)

Sylvia was born in Switzerland. Her father was an American representative for a company that made surveying and other precision instruments. Sylvia grew up in the United States but her family returned to Switzerland when she was sixteen. “When I was a kid I read
Swiss Family Robinson
,” she said, “and I was absolutely smitten by the ideas of self-reliance and resourcefulness.” After eight years in Switzerland, Sylvia flew back to the United States and tended her first garden in 1978 in Milton, Massachusetts. As the years passed, she began to see pet varieties disappearing from seed catalogs. Seeds were being lost. They were being displaced by hybrids, taken over by corporations. To save them was a basic but necessary skill, and Sylvia began to see herself as a steward of seeds.

“A lot of people are just beginning to garden and already thinking about seed saving,” Sylvia continues. “This gives me a lot of hope, since it means awareness is growing about how important the work is. I came to it much more gradually.”

“Was it difficult to switch from gardening to seed saving?” I ask.

“There’s definitely a shift in awareness of timing and the need for observation. It feels like learning a new Romance language: I already know French but am learning Spanish. The grammar is the same but the words are different.”

In this moment I’m distracted, trying to listen to a very thoughtful gardener and, at the same time, experience every inch of her garden.
We come to a bed of True Red Cranberry, a pole bean she obtained from Abundant Life Seed Company in 1997, when the variety was rare, before it made a grand comeback. “I tell new gardeners to start with simple things, self-pollinators like peas and beans. All you need to do to save legumes is let them dry on the vine.”

We stop at a drift of zucchini. “I grow only one variety at a time,” says Sylvia.

“Because they cross easily?”

“Yes, it’s a challenge to keep varieties pure. And I plant only one species of winter squash a year.”

“Which one, may I ask?”

“Red Kuri.” Red Kuri is a thick-skinned, deep-orange winter squash that is popular in Japan. “Interestingly, without my knowing it, my sister in Switzerland’s favorite squash is Pôtimarron, which looks identical to Red Kuri. This year I decided to grow both, to see which is best. But only one is here. The other is in a friend’s garden.”

It is soon obvious that Sylvia is an experimenter, an emblem of a fine mind.

“My latest project,” she says, “is the search for two outstanding onions, a yellow one and a red one, that will be particularly suited to our area.” She explains that onions are biennials, meaning they flower and produce seeds in their second year. So to get seeds, the root must be stored for the winter and then replanted, after which the plant will flower, then set seeds. “Last year I grew fifteen different onions. I stored them in the root cellar. I have records of when they broke dormancy.”

“I don’t see fifteen different onions here.” I look around.

“Oh,” she smiles. “I parceled them out to friends to grow. I’m growing to seed in different gardens.”

“Are these friends all over the country?”

“Most are right here in Hartland, Vermont. I want to be profoundly local.” I like that:
profoundly local
.

We pick our way across the garden to see the onion variety Sylvia chose for herself: Southport Red Globe. It grows straight and green, flush with life. “When the little husks around each of the seeds begin to dry out, I will collect them. Of each onion variety I will ask: Does it grow well? Does it store well? Does it taste good? Does it produce seed within one season, with the climate we have here?”

In this experiment Sylvia is a plant selector, not a breeder. Breeding involves producing a specific target. “What I’m doing feels more like a partnership, letting the plant express itself.” She talks about phenotype, which means observable traits, and genotype, which is genetic makeup. “Plants will respond in one season to my circumstances. Maybe there’s different soil, a different elevation, something slightly different from the place the plant previously grew. Traits hidden because of conditions can surface,” she said. “For example, I got a leek from William Woys Weaver. It was originally hardy only to Zone 7. After growing it for a number of years and selecting for seed production the plants that survived winter, it’s now winter-hardy here in Vermont. It still looks exactly like the leek I got,” she continued. “But I can leave it in the ground all winter. That leek had the genetic capabilities of adjusting to this place.”

Sylvia has another idea for an experiment. She wants to grow Sheepnose pepper and allow it to adapt year by year to her central Vermont environment. At the same time, she will save some original Sheepnose pepper seeds for ten years in a freezer and then grow them out. She wants to compare the two peppers. Are they the same? Or has the grown-out pepper slowly and visibly altered itself?

Like seed, each of us has traits hidden deep inside that under the right
conditions can emerge. Any of us can be selected and developed. We can
become the people we’ve always wanted to become. We can respond and
adjust, sure, but even more important, we can express ourselves. We can become something even stronger and more useful than we were before.

I’d heard Sylvia was working on dehybridizing the Sungold tomato. I’ve come to talk to her about this. Sungold is a popular tomato—a thin-skinned, orange cherry developed by the Tokita Seed Company of Japan—that I reject in my garden because it is a hybrid, obtainable only by purchase. By growing Sungold every year and selecting for the desired characteristics, Sylvia hoped to have a stable, open-pollinated version after about seven years. These seeds would produce Sungold tomatoes that would be open-source, in the public domain.

“I stopped that project,” she says now.

I wait, hand poised over my notebook at a bed of arugula.

“The Sungolds always cracked,” she said. “But Tim Peters of Peters Seed and Research developed Sweet Orange II that is totally crack-free. And Plumgold emerged in one of the years I was working. With great tomatoes like that, there was no need for my project to continue.” I subsequently learned that other breeders have used a parent line of Sungold in order to create an open-pollinated version of this variety, including Tom Wagner, who bred Flaming Juane and Flamme Burst.

In Sylvia’s garden I saw things I’d never seen before: salsify with its purple flowers and also
Scorzonera hispanica
, black salsify or oyster plant, nothing most people would plant in a flower garden but a rage of yellow flowers.

Sylvia turns. “Look at these little flowers with their little green tips. I mean, I ask you . . . ” And she doesn’t need to finish.

She pauses beside spinach. “Not many people realize,” she says, “that it has male and female plants.” She shows me the difference, using plants that overwintered under snow. “Once the seeds begin to mature, the male plants die back.” This is important to know. I hadn’t known it. Yet I had seen spinach plants dying without producing seeds and I had wondered. “The pollen is so fine it’s like face powder,” Sylvia says.

There is so much to learn, I am thinking.

“One of the fun things I am trying to do here is to garden as if we no longer had oil,” Sylvia says.

“Why?” I ask. It is, of course, a rhetorical question.

“Because soon we won’t have any!” She laughs, not because she thinks this is funny but as if the line requires some emotion and she can no longer cry about the fact we have reached the zenith of global oil production, and from here on out, we have to learn to live without it, because oil will get
more and more scarce, and thus more costly. The laugh is wry.

I am reminded of a Christmas card my friend Susan Murphy received. It said, “Words for a post-petroleum economy: It’s been a great party, but it’s time to go home! Home to our grandparents’ ways: growing our vegetables, traveling less, treasuring home, family, and friends more.” That doesn’t sound like a Christmas card, but it was.

“You’re a hero,” I say now to Sylvia.

“Just a gardener,” she replies.

She asks if I want to see the seed collection and I do, so we go inside to the basement, where a series of dorm refrigerators are filled with neatly organized bags and packets. Sylvia is cultivating a group of gardeners to be curators of this collection. They meet monthly, share seeds and gardening know-how, and work on collaborative projects to preserve worthy and endangered varieties. Sylvia’s little seed bank could replenish a region, start a lot of gardens, feed a lot of people, which is what makes this remarkable woman a revolutionary and an activist, although she might never call herself those things. What she would say is that she’s just trying to keep all of us well-fed.

In later correspondence with me, Sylvia eloquently summarized her mission with her garden. “What I’m aiming for is taking the local-food movement to the next logical level,” she wrote, “which is to establish a supply of locally grown seed as the underpinnings of a local food supply.” As she explained: “Currently the seeds we order through commercial catalogs are grown literally all over the world. They were grown under radically different growing conditions than those that exist where we live. Further, we don’t know how the seeds were grown, when they were harvested, or under what conditions they were processed, stored, or transported. It makes perfect sense to grow not just the plants but also the seeds in the area where the food will be consumed, giving them the opportunity to adapt on the deepest level.”

Sylvia’s wisdom and advice is worth repeating: “The logical next step for the local-food movement is to establish locally grown seeds.”

THE MUSIC IS LOUD
for a nature gala. A curly-haired woman with a guitar, backed by a drummer, is singing “Daddy, Won’t You Take Me Back to Muhlenberg County.” I’m eating a plate of coleslaw and baked beans, having figured the pulled pork to be industrial meat. The singer is rocking out and people are piling their plates high at the buffet—a fund-raiser for the protection of southeastern Georgia’s Satilla River, held at a lodge near Nahunta. It’s just me at a long table covered with a white cloth until a man who looks familiar hollers down.

“Mind if I join you?”

“I’d love the company.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I remember your face.”

“I teach at South Georgia. Doug Tarver is the name.”

I ask him how he’s been spending the summer and he says his garden is about to kill him.

“If the seed catalogs listed work-hours, nothing would sell.” I’m having to yell to be heard.

“It’s not that. I have a bad back.”

“Not fun,” I say.

“But I love it so much I do it anyway.”

“You growing any old varieties?” The song ends and my question is too loud.

A spark lights up his face. “I am,” he says. “A bean.”

“What’s the name of it?”

“Preacher bean.”

The beans were given to Dr. Tarver’s grandmother, Katie Tarver, a devoted gardener who lived in the piney woods of northern Louisiana, in LaSalle Parish. They were presented to her by a country preacher she admired, in the year 1912. The preacher was called to minister elsewhere, and his parting gift to Miss Katie was a handful of tan and purple string bean seeds that the family has kept alive by obeying one important rule.

The preacher asked Miss Katie to make the same promise he had given—to save two year’s worth of the best seeds, in case of crop loss. By planting time, unable to remember the name the minister gave the beans, Miss Katie called them Preacher beans. “They grew vigorously and produced exceptionally large quantities of green and purple beans,” Dr. Tarver said. Since 1912, for a century, the Tarver family has grown and shared these seeds.

It’s a great story, for a party or anytime. Stories like this urge us to make sure our own lives contain such stories that can persist, that can inform and encourage us.

This brings me to another point. An heirloom variety of seed, besides being a genetic resource, has another quality. It is a cultural resource. It has a story. The story changes as time passes. The story Dr. Tarver told about Preacher beans is not the one Katie Tarver told, which is not the one the preacher told. My story now has added another layer. And so the story grows, like humus on a forest floor.

Seeds, as Will Bonsall put it, are poignant and pregnant with story. He told me about a seedsperson and agricultural explorer named Jack Harlan who traveled to Turkey in 1948 to collect plants, especially grains, for the USDA. In Turkey, Harlan discovered incredible diversity, but he didn’t record the names of many seeds he found there; they were simply identified by serial numbers upon his return. In other words, Harlan was collecting raw germplasm. “So you don’t get information about utilization,” Bonsall had said. “You don’t get culture, tall tales.” (Several decades later Harlan returned to Turkey and was astounded at the number of varieties he was unable to find.)