The Triumph of Seeds (18 page)

“O
ur collection is a living collection,” Diane Ott Whealy told me. “Heirloom vegetables aren’t like heirloom furniture or jewelry—you can’t just take them out once in a while and dust them off. The best way to preserve these seeds is to plant them.”

I reached Whealy at her office on the farm, an audibly busy place where people interrupted our conversation regularly to ask questions or schedule meetings. Like Fort Collins, the facility at Decorah boasts climate-controlled rooms generously stocked with seeds. But unlike the government establishment, Whealy’s group also runs an 890-acre farm, operates a mail-order seed business, and coordinates a growing global network of “backyard preservationists.” If Chris Walters can call 1,000 seed banks a movement, then the 13,000 members of the Seed Savers Exchange should count as a revolution. “We’re a people’s seed bank,” Diane said simply, “dedicated to identifying, preserving, and distributing heirloom vegetables.” But while she and her colleagues do maintain a traditional collection (with duplicate samples at Fort Collins and Svalbard), their overarching goal is to reconnect seeds with people, helping gardeners and farmers collect, trade, and, most importantly,
plant
heirloom seeds, year after year.

Diane and her then-husband, Kent Whealy, founded Seed Savers in 1975, inspired in part by the seeds of an unusual purple morning glory she inherited from her grandfather. (“That morning glory has a lot of personality,” she told me. “Just like grandpa.”) From a card table in their living room, the project quickly grew into a worldwide network of passionate seed collectors. “There’s a great emotional attachment to seeds,” she explained. “When people started
sending us samples, they often included a recipe. Yes, they wanted their varieties preserved, but they also wanted them to be grown, harvested, eaten—celebrated as food!” From the beginning, people also joined the exchange to meet other seed savers. An annual picnic evolved into a three-day seed conference and festival, and the exchange’s first seventeen-page newsletter grew into a tome the size of a phonebook listing more than 6,000 varieties for sale or trade, many of them available nowhere else.

From a biological perspective, Seed Savers provides a vital complement to the effort at Fort Collins. The larger facility holds a vast diversity, but it’s one that rarely changes—the seeds are only grown when the staff needs to restock the shelves. “Keeping seeds planted allows those varieties to continue adapting,” Diane explained. “Even without climate change, plants need to adjust to local conditions.” By virtue of their constant gardening, the seed savers do more than maintain garden diversity. They’re allowing the plants to evolve, helping create new variation that will stock the gardens and seed banks of the future.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Diane if she could envision a time when the work would be through, when enough people would be planting enough varieties to make seed banks unnecessary. “No, it’s never done,” she said, and laughed with the ease of someone who has found her calling. “We’ll be seed pushers forever.”

Part of the success of the Seed Savers Exchange lies in the willingness—even eagerness—of its membership. Any gardener, or anyone who has lived with a gardener, knows that planting and harvest are only part of the process. In our household, one of the most exciting gardening moments of the year comes in the dead of winter, with the arrival of the seed catalogs (including the hefty Seed Savers Yearbook). For Eliza, this marks the official start of a new season. While cold rain and windstorms rage outside, she pages contentedly through thousands of different vegetable and flower varieties, choosing the next year’s crops. Noah loves these catalogs, too, and it’s not unusual to find a few well-thumbed copies mixed in
with
Goodnight Moon
,
Make Way for Ducklings
, and the other classics tucked beside his bed.

Though fascinated by anything to do with seeds, I consider myself less a gardener than a garden “enabler.” For Eliza (and now Noah), gardening is both passion and pleasure, a fruitful addiction that I’m happy to support. If I focus on splitting firewood, cutting grass, and other household chores, it frees up more time for them to spend in our ever-expanding garden. And since we all share in the harvest of delicious fruits, vegetables, and berries, the arrangement works quite nicely. There is one patch of ground, however, that I help cultivate every year.

Like Eliza, my mother had a passion for gardening, and like me, my father always played a greater role in eating the produce than he did in the watering and weeding. But since Mom died, Noah and I have visited my dad every springtime to help him replant her garden, at least in part. Dad and I take solace in tilling and sowing the same soil she once worked, and in Noah’s unbridled enthusiasm for the whole affair. It’s a ritual of remembrance enriched by the curious biology of seeds—by dormancy, and the desire to coax life from something that appears so lifeless. That abiding mystery often brings even the most serious discussions of seed science to a place where fact meets philosophy.

Before leaving Fort Collins, I asked Chris once again to help me understand the metabolism of a dormant seed. Carol Baskin had told me that the cells were still active, but at a very reduced level. Chris held a different view. Dormant seeds do change over time, she admitted, but it wasn’t necessarily a sign of cell activity in the traditional sense. “I think what we’re seeing is just the natural breakdown of organic compounds,” she said, her years of chemistry coming to the fore. “It’s like an expiration date on a prescription medicine. The chemicals in the drug simply degrade until they stop working. Seeds are the same way.”

I knew Chris was speaking from experience. She had an entire research program devoted to measuring the air around seeds,
documenting changes in the chemical signatures they give off as they age. But it still bothered me. How could seeds be alive without any discernable metabolic activity?

“I’ll answer that question with a question,” she said immediately. “Does metabolism define life? If seeds are alive but aren’t metabolizing, then maybe we need to rethink our definition of what it means to be alive.”

After decades of study and thousands of years of planting and harvest, seeds retain the ability to challenge our most basic ideas. That makes them fascinating not only as a research topic, but also as a metaphor for life and renewal. It’s no coincidence that “seed” appears in more than three hundred English words and phrases, from the obvious
seed-corn
(grain saved for planting) to the less intuitive
hag-seeds
(the children of a witch). In fact, you could say that Chris had left me with a
thought-seed
, the kernel of a notion that may yet sprout, blossom, and bear fruit. I’m still thinking about what she said, because the only way to really know if a seed is alive, even at the National Seed Bank, is to plant it and see if it grows.

While people may speculate about the life contained in seeds, the flowers, shrubs, herbs, and trees that produce them have no room for doubt. Their faith is evolutionary and absolute. Nothing shows that better than the topic we’ll turn to next, the incredible (and incredibly useful) ways that plants defend their seeds. That spark of dormant life may be hidden and hard to measure, but mother plants will do almost anything to protect it.

Seeds Defend

Never come between a lioness and her cubs
.

—Traditional proverb

CHAPTER EIGHT

By Tooth, Beak, and Gnaw

Oh rats, rejoice!

The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!

So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon
,

Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!

—Robert Browning,

The Pied Piper of Hamelin
(1842)

A
ppendix F of the International Building Code stipulates requirements for keeping rats and other rodents out of all habitable dwellings. These include two-inch (five-centimeter) slab foundations, steel kick-plates, and tempered wire or sheet-metal grating over any ground-level opening. Conditions for grain storage or industrial facilities can be even stricter, involving thicker concrete, more metal, and curtain walls buried two feet below grade. In spite of all this, rats and their relations still consume or contaminate between 5 and 25 percent of the world’s grain harvest, and regularly gnaw their way into important structures of all kinds. In 2013, a trespassing rodent shorted out the switchboard at Japan’s ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant, sending temperatures in three cooling
tanks soaring and nearly setting off a repeat of the 2011 meltdown. The story made headlines around the world, with journalists, bloggers, and TV commentators all wondering what makes rats so interested in electrical wires. But the real question isn’t about what rodents like to eat; it’s about how difficult it is to stop them. Why on earth should a rat be able to chew through concrete walls in the first place?

The name “rodent” comes from the Latin verb
rodere
, “to gnaw,” a reference both to the way rodents chew and to the massive incisors that help them do it so well. These teeth evolved in small mouse- or squirrel-like creatures approximately 60 million years ago. That’s approximately 60 million years
before
the invention of concrete, Plexiglas, sheet metal, or any of the other manmade materials that rats and mice now chew through. Experts still argue about the exact origin of rodents, but there is little doubt about what those big teeth were good for. While the family tree now includes oddballs like beavers, who chew wood, and naked mole rats, who use their teeth for digging, the vast majority of rodents still make much of their living the old-fashioned way: by
gnawing seeds.

Before rodents came along, the ancestors of trees like oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts got by with little winged pips that offered scant protection from chewing. Fossils of these seeds look like lumpy flecks of chaff, insubstantial wisps designed to flutter a bit as they fell. Once the gnawing began, however, these plants and their rodent predators entered a virtual arms race: stronger teeth led to harder seed coats and vice versa, changing those ancient seeds into the acorns and thick-shelled nuts we’re familiar with today. (Other seeds responded by getting even smaller, in the hopes of being swallowed whole, or ignored altogether.) For the trees, rodents posed an evolutionary dilemma: the chance to get their seeds dispersed balanced against the risk of losing them entirely. For rodents, unlocking the nutrition in seeds turned out to be an evolutionary gold mine: they quickly became the most numerous and diverse group of mammals on the planet.

The notion of coevolution implies that change in one organism can lead to change in another—if antelope start running faster, then cheetahs must run faster still to catch them. Traditional definitions describe the process as a tango between familiar partners, where each step is met by an equal and elegant counter-step. In reality, the dance floor of evolution is usually a lot more crowded. Relationships like those between rodents and seeds develop in the midst of something more like a square dance, with couples constantly switching partners in a whir of spins, promenades, and do-si-dos. The end result may appear like quid pro quo, but chances are a lot of other dancers influenced the outcome—leading, following, and stepping on toes along the way. No one knows the exact sequence of events that gave us strong-jawed rodents and thick-shelled seeds; the story played out long ago and left only general clues in the fossil record. But few experts believe their sudden and simultaneous rise was mere coincidence.

In many cases, the relationships that developed became mutually beneficial—the gnawers got something to eat and dispersed a few of the plant’s seeds in the process. Hunger alone drives the rodent side of this equation, but for plants it’s like walking a tightrope. Their seeds must be attractive enough to be desired, but tough enough so that they can’t be devoured on the spot. A hard shell forces rodents to carry seeds away and gnaw them open later, in the safety of a burrow. Ideally, the rodents then forget where they’ve hidden things, or perish before they get around to eating them. Take the example of Beatrix Potter’s book
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
. Scholars think she wrote it as a commentary on Britain’s class system, but it’s also a story about seeds: if the squirrels on Owl Island gather and stash away nuts, and if Old Brown the owl attacks the occasional squirrel, then some of those nuts will go uneaten and the next generation of oaks and hazels will live on. (Nutkin managed to escape with only the loss of his tail, but we must assume that Old Brown is more successful on other attempts.)

Potter set her story in England’s Lake District, but if she had lived in Central America she would have put it right where I did my doctoral research, under the spreading boughs of an
almendro
tree. There, little Nutkin would have found not only plenty of squirrels to keep him company, but also other rodents: pocket mice, rice rats, climbing rats, and spiny rats, as well as pacas and agoutis, which look more or less like guinea pigs the size of small dogs. Like me, all of these species came to
almendro
trees in search of seeds. Unlike me, the rodents had been at it for thousands, if not millions, of years. (A dissertation only
feels
like it takes that long.) With so many gnawing creatures hanging around, it’s no wonder
almendro
developed a shell hard enough to challenge a graduate student. But the nuances of seed defense rarely stop at physical protection alone. The ecology of this one rainforest tree makes it clear why so many seeds are stony, and why it takes a lot more than concrete to stop a hungry rat.