Every Precious Inch Of Space Made Fertile
Out there in the rich tapestry of humanity there are people whose purpose is finding lost apples
There are green signs of life in every corner of my tiny garden. It isn’t much—a 3’ x 2’ raised bed on stilts that my friend Tim and I put together on a balmy March day last year—but it is big and deep enough to grow all sorts of things. Some I put where they are on purpose, some have appeared without my planning: an abortive attempt at growing forget-me-nots last spring did not lead to any sprays of pale blue flowers, but it has littered the bed with a seemingly unstoppable colony of fuzzy leaf bundles.
Five minutes of research would have told me that forget-me-nots are basically a weed, and that they flower best in shady, boggy conditions. But that’s not really how I roll, and so they’re one more failed experiment in my back patio lab. They join such esteemed company as “Venus fly traps purchased from seed at a carnivorous plant nursery in Oregon” in the graveyard of my green thumb.
This is not to say that nothing is growing how I wanted it to. I planted sage and mint, two other prolific spreaders, a week after we built the planter. I had fresh herbs when I wanted all spring, summer, and fall; short of trimming off the shaggiest and brownest bits every few weeks, they thrived through the winter without any help from me. Now I’ve got a handsome crop of each, and I’ve been enjoying investigating the tangled little world beneath their leaves—looking at bugs, poking the tiny mushrooms they’re shading, and accidentally-on-purpose coating my hands in their fragrant oils. The sage is even starting to flower, which didn’t happen last year and has been a nice little surprise.
I’m hoping that this group will be joined soon by cilantro (sprouting now at ground zero of last year’s forget-me-not disaster), lupine, dwarf sunflowers (which I grew three of very successfully last year), and fireweed (the biggest wildcard and the one I have the least faith in pulling off). My approach to all this has been scattershot and unscientific, but if I don’t have the head for the orderly science of it all, I feel obligated to at least learn my history. Luckily for me there’s no end of interesting writing about the complex nature of where plants have been and where they’re going.
Take apples, for instance. Perhaps due to their roots (ha) as the symbol of wholesome Americana, a number of groups exist that track and catalog and even hunt for apple varieties. It turns out that occasionally rare apple breeds once thought extinct come back to the surface, either by accident or by sleuthing. In the latter case, a whopping 10 varieties once thought gone forever were discovered by just two men in the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 2019 alone. The line between “hobby” and “life’s mission” is often blurry and it amuses and delights me to no end that out there in the rich tapestry of humanity there are people whose purpose is finding lost apples. Like a Knights Templar for fruit.
Each fall, Brandt and Benscoter spend countless hours and log hundreds of miles searching for ancient — and often dying — apple trees across the Pacific Northwest by truck, all-terrain vehicle and on foot. They collect hundreds of apples from long-abandoned orchards that they find using old maps, county fair records, newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers that can tell them which homesteader bought what apple tree and when the purchase happened. By matching names from those records with property maps, they can pinpoint where an orchard might have been — and they often find a few specimens still growing there.
I see this picture resurface on Tumblr and Twitter every so often and it gets a smile out of me each time without fail.
Another good read about this comes from former Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh, who recently explored the complex sociological ramifications of corporate seed engineering through the inspiring and tragic story of Esiah Levy, the English son of a Jamaican immigrant who founded a seed sharing program that has touched the far corners of the earth.
Like any good artist I am always looking for things to steal, and I was amused and impressed by one of Esiah’s techniques that Ruby shares in her piece: how to pollinate plants if there aren’t any bees, birds, or tools available.
I love the way that she writes about him, and I love the window into the man that anecdotes like this give us:
…he turned the family kitchen into the locus of his experiments in homemade mulching materials. Banana peels, coffee grounds and eggshells would be dried out in the oven and layered with cardboard over the soil. Kealy complained of the smell that would linger in the oven, lamenting the oven tray all but lost to these experiments, but the results were undeniable. Weeds would struggle to pierce through the rich mulching layer. What’s more, as the material broke down, it would contribute valuable nutrients to the earth. Every scrap was repurposed, every precious inch of space made fertile, everything fodder for growth.
She tells the story of Esiah’s connections from Ghana to Palestine to France, highlighting the peculiar nature of seeds, the paradoxical ways that they survive.
To save a seed, the impulse might be to hold this tiny capsule static, keeping it in a state of suspended potential. But what happens when organisms are preserved not by being frozen in time but by being rooted in the here and now, by being planted? One seed creates a hundred more, each generation enacting a kind of living, in vivo, conservation, while continuing to evolve and adapt…These seeds are preserved by being planted and talked about, shared, germinated, cooked, eaten: kept alive not in isolation, but in conversation with the (agri)cultures of which they necessarily form a part.
Damn.
An ocean away from Esiah Levy, a man named Will Bonsall also does what he can to make himself a hub for the seeds of the world. And he specializes, unlike Levy, not in practical growth but in the preservation of rare and dying breeds of food crops. He has saved, for example, the lineage of a rare beet that was once grown in a region of Bosnia that ended up decimated by war. He has turned a few packets of Native flint corn into a favorite crop of small farmers across New England. A neighbor’s special variety of cucumber, grown and distributed by Bonsall, is now a worldwide hit. And he does all this for pennies, if not for free.
I quite like the ambling, unscientific way that Bonsall approaches his collection—not to be confused with his planting techniques themselves, which are very scientific, repeated and tinkered with dozens or hundreds of times across the decades.
Bonsall seems to value rarity and diversity for their own sakes. Among his alphabetized envelopes are plenty of heirloom seeds that no one is particularly clambering to plant, but Bonsall compares his collection to a library — he doesn’t get rid of something just because no one has checked it out in a while.
I think it takes real grit to keep working so hard at something that you know has real importance, even as the world appears to move on.
Anyway we are hitting real spring weather in Seattle now. Over the weekend the days oscillated between rain and sun, bathing and drying the earth, filling the air with perfume and giving back to the soil everything it needs after an interminable gray winter.
The persistent fecundity of this broken world sometimes feels undeserved.
Out of sight, these small living things are drawing that rainwater from the soil, are turning toward the sunlight, are churning through a million chemical reactions to eke out extra centimeters of height and breadth. The hysteranthous trees are starting to drop their petals and burst with leaves. All of this makes me hopeful about the end of this period of suspended animation, knowing that we share with the seeds the truth that we are not who we are meant to be if we are held in storage indefinitely. I trust that someday we’ll save ourselves by growing again, too.
-Chuck
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