More people are growing fruits and vegetable at their homes while they practice social distancing pic.twitter.com/8W2xTn0ZvL
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 20, 2020
Many thanks to commentor The Mighty Trowel for a lovely Sunday essay on seeds and human connections. Ruby Tandoh, in Medium, on “The Life and Dreams of Esiah Levy”:
The seeds would arrive in envelopes, their names scrawled in ballpoint pen across the back. ‘Giant Hubbard,’ read one packet, the seeds for the heavy, dense-fleshed squash landing in Wiltshire in England’s rural south-west. A package of squash and corn seeds found its way to a village perched on Senegal’s coast, just south of the nation’s capital, Dakar. In Cypress, southern California, a similar parcel arrived. Inside the crumpled paper was a jumble of seeds for rhubarb and beautiful, mosaic-like glass gem corn, each kernel shimmering a different colour.
It was an operation as vast as it was ramshackle. Old envelopes that once delivered bank statements or utility bills were torn open, filled with seeds, taped back together and sent back out into the world, given new, green life. Sometimes seeds were carefully divided and labelled, keeping white zucchini separate from beetroot and scotch bonnet pepper. Other times, they were crammed into one packet, beans nestled alongside tiny lettuce seeds or dried corn kernels. One package to southern Germany contained eight varieties of squash alone. Hundreds of envelopes, containing thousands of seeds, were scattered across five continents, missing only those far reaches of Australia and the frozen expanse of Antarctica.
This empire of seeds tells an unlikely story. Trace its sprawling roots back to their source and you will find that they converge in Croydon, a town to the south of London, tucked just inside the capital’s roaring orbital motorway…
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: “Empire of Seeds”Post + Comments (142)