A friend hands me a gift: a small brown paper envelope. I unfurl its rolled-up, unsealed mouth and peek inside. Seeds. Pinky brown tiny balls. I usher a few out into the palm of my hand. I stare at them before raising my gaze to my friend’s smiling face. I smile back. 

These seeds are the descendants of plants I grew last year and the year before that. They travelled with me to a new place when I moved the year before last. I don’t know much about their journey before that, but I do know that they carry the stories of every grower who came before – before me and my friend. In spring, I gifted these seeds to him. Come autumn, he is gifting them back to me, now with another growing season woven into their story. 

The seeds’ ancestors grew as wild plants. And from those wild plants, our ancestors saved seeds and grew plants, again and again, for generations, in a beautiful collaboration unfolding for millennia. 

As I hold these seeds, I also hold thoughts of an entwined history of people, plants and place, of collaboration and reciprocity.  

*****

When I tell people that I’m a seed saver – or better yet, a seed activist – I’m often greeted with confused faces. “You mean seeds, like seeds for the garden?” I do, indeed. “Why would you save them?” 

This is a simple enough question. But it has a somewhat complex answer.    

The intellectual reason: saving seed is a way to reclaim our food sovereignty in a time when the world’s food systems are increasingly owned and controlled by big corporations driven by profit (a meaty statement, I know – we’ll expand on this later). It is also a way to save and restore the biodiversity of our food crops. 

The emotional reason: it feels good to work with plants. Yes, certainly, it has its challenges, but to tend to other beings, to give them love, to move through their cycles with them, feels good.

*****

The garden was there for me when I needed it. I’ve never been particularly green-thumbed. I love the idea – the image – of having a vegetable garden, but I hadn’t ever made the time for it until a few years ago. 

Like many, when the pandemic hit and the world turned upside down, I suddenly found the time, not to garden but to stare my life in the face, examine what was working and what wasn’t, who I wanted to be and what life I envisioned for myself, post-apocalypse.

While pondering these questions, I took sanctuary in the woods, among the steadfast aliveness of nature, while the humans hid away. The noise of the human world – and subsequently, the busyness of my own mind – had been turned down, and suddenly, I could hear the soft sounds of the land. It spoke in a way that was comforting at a time when it was challenging to find comfort. 

A few months earlier, I’d been gifted some seeds. Perhaps the plants that would grow from them could also offer comfort, I thought. 

I watched YouTube videos and diligently cleared space for a vegetable patch. I gently folded my seeds into the soil and waited, nervously, excitedly. I checked on them daily until tiny green shoots had breached following instructions encoded in them to find the light and be welcomed into the world. 

I was also there to welcome them. Plants are resilient, but I knew my care in these formative days and weeks was important to their survival. But in turn, they would eventually provide food – which for my ancestors would have ensured their survival. A fair trade, I believe. An act of reciprocity.   

*****

Seeds were once a community’s most precious resource. They were stored safely and carried with people as they moved, migrated and fled. And as the seeds travelled with us, and the plants grew in new places, they adapted, to new soils, climates, environments, to new growers as the seeds were shared, each grower influencing the plant in some small way.

All these micro-adaptions, to place and people, result in growing biodiversity. Some tomatoes have learned to like sandy soil, or humid air, or cold nights. Some kales are hardy to deep frosts, or strong winds, or heavy rains. Some squashes are resilient to dusty mildew, or overwatering, or underfeeding. The diversity is vast, in how they survive; in how they taste, look, feel; in their very being. 

The industrialisation of our food systems has eroded this diversity. Ninety-three percent of food crop varieties have been lost in the past century. I’ll repeat that: 93 percent of crop varieties are gone in just a hundred years. This loss increases as the industrial farming model continues to be rolled out; worldwide, the polycultures of small-scale farms continue to be replaced by sweeping and mechanised monocultures farmed to maximise profit. These agricultural systems feature crops “optimised” for the industrial farm and, by design, heavily rely on inputs that deeply damage the land and pollute the waters. 

All those lost stories, adaptations and varieties have put us in a precarious position regarding future food security. Globally, we are increasingly reliant on a smaller and smaller number of crop varieties, which, as our climate rapidly changes and environmental pressures amp up, may not have what is needed to survive. Then what?

******

Radishes. Peas. Tomatoes. Salad greens. Spring onions. Kale. Squashes. My garden was gifting me its fruits. I felt gratitude for food that I’d never felt before. I relished in the collaboration between the plants and me as I popped plump radishes from the ground and plucked ripe tomatoes from the vine. 

Left unharvested, some radish plants grew tall stems and shot out branches, amassing to about a metre in height and about half as wide. Then they blossomed with small white flowers. Before long, where the flowers had been, tiny green fingers emerged, which grew plumper by the day. I watched curiously, having never seen radish plants mature before. The plant began to wither and wane, seemingly reaching the end of its life, and the fingers turned brown. As if instinctually, I broke one open to see what was inside. Seeds.   

When I first planted my garden, I saw seeds only for their potential – for the plants that would be and the food that would grow – not for what the seeds are: living beings resting in wait for the right conditions to germinate, holding all the genetic information to start new life. For many vegetables grown in the garden, seeds are both the beginning and the end of a plant’s lifecycle. 

It hadn’t occurred to me before that alongside a bounty of vegetables, the garden’s gifts would include the promise of food next year. 

I researched how to process, dry and store the seeds and carefully kept them safe for the next growing season when we would continue, and deepen, our collaboration, the plants and me. 

******

Just like food, an increasing amount of the world’s seed is farmed industrially. It is believed that just four companies now control over 60 percent of the world’s seed sales. And just like food, seed is being produced in a way to maximise profit, both at the seed production and food production level. Often, the seeds are produced far from where they will be planted, sometimes even continents away. The plants that will grow will be strangers to those new lands. They won’t know how to thrive there.   

Additionally, agricultural companies “design” seeds through controlled breeding programs and genetic modification with the DNA of other beings to fit the industrial paradigm under the guise of supporting farmers and increasing societies’ food security. Farmers are lured away from traditional and local crop varieties to new crop varieties that promise higher yields and less labour, only for farmers to find themselves stuck in a cycle of reliance. The seeds they buy are often subject to intellectual property law, and due to the way that they are designed, the plants that grow from them are often sterile or the next generation of plant is a far cry from the parent plant, so year after year, farmers must continue to purchase seed. (In some parts of the world, farmers who have saved seed from plants carrying proprietary genetics have been sued by agricultural companies, often losing their farms and livelihoods).

With a monopoly, these agricultural companies decide which crop varieties remain in the industrialised food system and which don’t. Decisions are based on economics – this is the reality of the free market. When a variety doesn’t prove “economically viable”, it is dropped. 

******

I’ve long struggled with the fact that the consumptive, capitalist system, driven by profit, growth and greed, is eroding, destroying and unravelling beautifully and unfathomably complex ecologies that have evolved over aeons. My work as a storytelling practitioner in the social-environmental space means I must regularly examine the realities of our decaying and highly unjust world. For a long time, I carried a lot of anger and grief and took a very pessimistic outlook on the trajectory of our global society and the natural world at large. I’m sure many can relate. It’s an easy place to get to if you are paying attention.

I was compelled to become an activist. I took to the streets to protest, to my MP’s inbox to crusade and to social media to rant. But these activities often left me feeling hollow and frustrated as they rarely seemed to amount to much. 

And then, I found myself in the garden, relishing the joy that comes from working with plants. I didn’t come to gardening as an activist. I came as someone who needed to feel more connected to the living world, as someone who craved the company of other beings as a form of comfort. Yet simply letting those radish plants mature, go to seed, and then save that seed, I had become an activist, again.

I didn’t realise it then, but on the tiny piece of land I was tending, I was part of the antidote to the loss of biodiversity of food crops driven by the industrial agricultural system. I grew seeds not “owned” by anyone, that have been passed down through time (open-pollinated seeds). Some were heirloom seeds, meaning their characteristics have been preserved by growers over many generations. By saving seeds from one generation of the plant to the next, I was enabling the plants to get to know me and my place – my soil, my climate, my environment. Our knowing of one another will only deepen with each growing season. With this knowing comes new adaptations. And with this comes more biodiversity.

I learnt this later, following that first growing season. There was no hollowness nor feelings of futility to this form of activism. Quite the opposite. Without leaving my garden, while tending to plants, in working with nature’s cycles, not only was I protesting the destruction caused by industrial agriculture, but I was also fighting back against it. I was preserving and restoring the diversity of food crops. What a remarkable realisation that was – a truly joyful form of activism.  

****** 

It’s now my opinion that the importance of the reciprocity within seed saving between the plants and the growers who tend them has intensified in our times. Our ancestors stewarded these plants through time and, in return, were gifted food to survive. My existence is owed to this, as is yours dear reader. The more I learn, the more I believe that it is the duty of us growers to ensure the remaining seven percent of crop varieties weather the storm of destruction we are amid, not just for the plant varieties’ survival but for ours and our future generations. A mutually assured survival. 

The beauty of this form of activism is that the collaboration can extend beyond the grower and the plants to the grower’s community. Seed saving – seed activism – works best when communities work together, saving, sharing and swapping seeds, encouraging local adaptions of plants and creating more biodiversity.

And so I take the envelope of seeds handed to me by my friend, knowing that it is one of many envelopes that will find their way into the hands of growers, and I place it safely in a box alongside other brown envelopes scrawled with handwritten notes about their contents. In this moment, this box represents both my future joy of growing and my protest against the drivers of destruction so that instead, in the future, we may flourish and thrive, the plants and us.