Gardening, like knitting and quilting, is often portrayed as a harmless hobby for frail retirees: genteel ladies in flowered dresses fussing over sickly roses and so on.
But anyone who has witnessed the unfurling of a sprout from the spring ground knows that growing is an act of elemental magic, and anyone who has seen an old concrete foundation split apart by roots and vines knows that plants have the power to tear down and remake even the most obstinate of structures.
No wonder, then, that seeds have been so central to an alternative gardening narrative, one that puts plants squarely at the heart of resistance to the evils of disenfranchisement.
This isn’t a story that is particularly well known. What, for instance, do plants have to do with racial and economic marginalization? More than you would think.
As a glance at New York’s urban history shows, plant and human welfare are symbiotic. In the 1960s and 1970s, when redlining and mass disinvestment led to hellscapes of vacant lots and abandoned buildings in lower-income neighborhoods of the city, residents fought back through numerous innovative means.
The heavily redlined Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, suffering from lack of green space, was repopulated with trees through the efforts of Hattie Carthan, who convinced the city in 1968 to offer a tree-matching program, which gave her six trees for every four that she planted. Carthan enlisted the help of local children in planting up the neighborhood, and from that effort, the Tree Corps grew, affording Bed-Stuy not just a tree canopy but community, civic engagement and education as well.
Other city neighborhoods employed more radical means, initially, as a response to municipal neglect. On the Lower East Side, residents seed-bombed abandoned lots to which they had no legal access in order to regreen their own neighborhood, tossing a compacted “bomb” of seeds, fertilizer, and peat moss over the city’s fences and watching the flowery effects the following year.
The Green Guerillas, as they called themselves, eventually convinced the city in 1974 to lease one of its neglected lots to them for $1 — the first city-sanctioned community garden, which gave rise to a full-blown, citywide community garden movement.
So seeds can bolster the future, but they also have the power to link the present and past. Many of us tend to think of seeds as vaguely inert, like chemicals in a lab perhaps (just add water and sun), but seeds live in many different planes, carrying with them the spirit and history of certain peoples.
Rematriation is a term I learned only recently. It’s a concept that, in Indigenous communities, refers to the reclamation of ancestral remains, culture, knowledge and resources. In the case of seeds, it refers to the reunification of specific strains of corn and other seeds with their Native tribes — seeds with as much variety in flavor, color, size and hardiness as there are Native peoples.
That vast variety is the result of selective breeding and a sophisticated understanding of specific climate, plant and growing conditions on the part of Indigenous farmers spanning the North American continent from the Southwest to the area that is now Quebec, over thousands of years.
That knowledge was often lost as Native people were killed or forced to move to other places. Some of the seed died out as well; other seeds survived, however, kept alive in part by white farmers who were sustained through difficult financial times by the crop that tribes had cultivated specifically for the land that white farms consequently occupied.
The surviving seeds are now being rematriated to their native tribes as part of a growing food sovereignty movement, with the goal of giving Indigenous people more control over their food supply.
All this might be considered just a bit of seed arcana — interesting, but not particularly relevant to daily life. What does seed disenfranchisement have to do with your average muddle about what to cook for dinner?
But there is a very real sense in which everyone — or at least anyone who eats food — has been disenfranchised by our current food system. Just four companies — four! — control more than 60% of global seed sales, a monopoly that holds across crop types as well. (Three firms — Monsanto, Syngenta and Vilmorin — control 60% of the global vegetable seed market.) Sequestered and monopolized, bred for only a few select characteristics, seeds lose their dimensionality and become merely property.
The effects of such centralization are dire. Large seed companies are notably aggressive about protecting their intellectual property (i.e., their seeds), leading to more restrictions on how seeds are used and exchanged, which in turn limits seed saving and research practices, ultimately making a large pool of plant genetics unavailable to researchers, farmers, and independent growers and threatening the diversity of seed in our landscapes and food supply.
A system too heavily dependent on so few varieties of crops has little resilience in the face of climate change. The Irish potato famine, for instance, came about because Irish farmers at the time raised only one kind of potato; when a new fungus came and wiped out that crop, the whole population suffered mightily.
But if you have a little will and a little space to garden, you can take a stand against the damaging prevalence of such homogeny. If you’re growing from seed this year, or have seeds of your own to share, consider joining the Seed Savers Exchange, an online forum that allows people from all around the country to exchange heirloom seeds — for only the cost of shipping — with others from around the country, with the purpose of preserving the diversity of the U.S.’s crop heritage for future generations.
Closer to home, the Grow Food Northampton Annual Seed Swap takes place on March 19 at the Winter Market at the Northampton Senior Center, and features all locally grown seeds from your neighbors’ gardens. This spring also marks the launch of 413 Free Seeds, a local seed library project helmed by Cara Iacoponi, who has combined her love of free little libraries, food accessibility and mutual aid into a community exchange of seeds for growers.
413 Free Seeds, which will house its seed collection at Forbes and potentially Lilly Library as well, will offer a combination of Iacoponi’s seeds, overstock from local farmers, and seeds donated from gardeners at the Grow Food Northampton Community Garden. Future plans include a seed fridge for shelf life and germination, depending on funding; microgrants to help pay for seed packaging and expanded seed variety; and more local libraries through which to distribute seeds to their communities.
According to Iacoponi, 413 Free Seeds also plans to offer a QR code for growers who visit the library, giving them access to resources related to growing and seed saving, so that even beginners can take part in a venture that has the potential to literally change the world.
A small, hyperlocal part of the world, I grant you. But as the history of seeds demonstrates, true, lasting power comes from the care and husbandry of hyperlocal communities, in all their specific glory.
Francie Lin is Grow Food Northampton’s writer-in-residence. She can be reached at francie@growfoodnorthampton.org.