Seeds come in over a quarter of a million varieties, maybe more, since if there’s one thing we know for sure it’s that we don’t know everything. They vary in size from orchid seeds, barely visible to the eye and called “dust seeds,” to the seed of coco de mer palm, or sea coconut, which is native to the Seychelles, an island nation off Africa’s east coast.
Seeds are compact (well, not counting the sea palm so much) packages that contain an entire future plant (well, not counting the tiny orchid seeds that need fungi to grow.) That sentence alone provides a clue to just how varied seeds can be, but typically, they contain an embryonic flowering plant and its food supply in a protective casing that keeps the plant and its food together and safe until conditions are just right.
Those conditions can be as varied as seeds themselves. Temperature, moisture and light are key. Some seeds are freed to grow only by fire, like those of prairie or savannah grasses or the dwarf pitch pines on the high ridges of the Shawangunk Mountains. Dormancy, the seed’s built-in timer that prevents germination until the conditions are right for growth, is a miracle in its own way; many seeds can stay dormant for years. The current record is held by a seed found in Siberian permafrost, a narrow-leafed campion that scientists managed to revive and grow after 32,000 years of dormancy in the cold and dark. (It’s believed that the seed was buried by an ice-age squirrel, who then lost track of it.
Seeds are crucial to survival, and humans have been making rules around them for a long time. For most of history, the rules relied on custom and community; sharing and selling seeds among neighboring gardeners and farmers was pretty straightforward, since all parties to the deal would be near enough to be accountable for the results when the plants popped up. Saving, storing and exchanging seeds is one of the oldest and most basic forms of trade.
In 1939, in the United States, the Federal Seed Act sought to formalize and codify this sort of thing. After all, you can’t tell much by looking at a seed about how it might be expected to behave. So the feds and most states began regulating seeds for purity and germination rates, and limiting or outright prohibiting noxious weed seeds, as well as requiring that any chemical treatments be included in the label.
Then, in the 50s and 60s, came something called the Green Revolution. Science began developing high-yield varieties (HYVs) of grain, bred to maximize food production and shorten the length of time it took to harvest. There was an upside to this: it’s believed to have prevented famine in several places. However, unlike their heirloom cousins, HYVs are divas. They rely on fertilizers and pesticides and lots and lots of water, and led to the rise of industrial monoculture farming—dandy for the corporations, awful for the soil.
I’ve seen this up close—where we lived in the Kentucky Pennyroyal, farmers rotated between corn and soybeans, year after year, relying on pesticides and chemical fertilizers. It was widely considered to be the only way to make a living farming. It probably was. It also resulted in a virtual food desert in the heart of rolling, green once-fertile country, and skyrocketing rates of cancer and other ills. The Green Revolution brought more food, but at a steep price.
Corporate logic being what it is, huge companies have been increasingly striving to establish more control over seeds ever since. Scientific research and development, global commodity chains that relied on uniformity, and patents have resulted in ridiculous laws allowing corporations to claim ownership over life forms, an absurd trend that’s only speeding up and hardening.
Happily, though, humans are resisting this on every level—from the Navdanya Seed Law, aka the Law of the Seed, an open-source document propagated by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, to the sprouting of seed exchanges and libraries. One such library, that started out as a tiny corner in the Gardiner Library, has grown into the Hudson Valley Seed Company, now with its own all-organic farm thriving in Accord. Seed and plant swaps thrive all over the region; the Kingston Library maintains its own seed and tool library for gardeners, free to check out for every card holder.
Truly, striving to control seeds is a bridge too far and patently (a-hem) absurd in every way. Plant seed. Tend seed. Plant thrives and ultimately creates a whole new batch of seeds. It’s a process that was going on for millennia without any human intervention whatsoever. It’s some of the cleanest and clearest magic on this amazing planet.
That’s probably why seeds are one of our most popular and enduring metaphors in any language, stretching back to the Bible and probably before. Seeds are hope. Seeds are potential made real; just add patience and care. Seeds are survival. Seeds are rebirth.
And seeds are, in essence, uncontrollable. Bury them, even in frozen tundra for 32,000 years, and they’ll still generate new life. Every seed is a miracle, from the acorn that makes an oak to that good idea you’ve been playing with. Look around and find the soil and water you need—and stay seedy.