In 2018, I left the newsroom for the garden, relocating from Madison, Wisconsin, to a small town in the Missouri Ozarks. After more than two decades of daily journalism’s unrelenting grind, I was exhausted and heartsick.
I called it my “seed sabbatical,” figuring that after a year or so at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. I would move back to the city and on to some new venture, having learned a few things.
Not long after I started working with Baker Creek, founder Jere Gettle proposed a video series that would tell the stories of the heirloom varieties we sell, and we would publish print versions in The Whole Seed Catalog each year. Our goal was to explore and celebrate the cultural and historical significance of these varieties, and, whenever possible, highlight the individuals who preserved or revived them.
Now, more than 100 stories later, I have come to see that through seeds we can trace the sweep of human civilization, in all of its complexity, messiness, violence, struggle and resilience. Seeds, like other goods, spread across the globe on the winds of war, migration (forced and voluntary), enslavement, exploration, exploitation and trade. Seeds are intrinsically bound to the cultural, historical, and social forces that shape human communities.
For millennia, farmers everywhere have been breeding and refining varieties adapted to their local growing conditions. Countless heirloom varieties have been lost to time, but others have endured, passed down in communities and families season after season. They are seeds rooted in time, place and story.
Heirloom varieties fascinate us because, in Jere Gettle’s words, they “tell a story about a culture, whether it’s your culture or another culture.”
The stories in the series span the globe, from an Ethiopian eggplant that became a culinary treasure in Italy, to a romaine lettuce cultivated in the urban gardens of Istanbul for more than 1,000 years. You’ll learn the story of how one man saved a distinctive purple carrot grown only in the mountain town of Bre, in Switzerland, and how a beloved Basque pepper came to grow in the agricultural fields around Boise, Idaho.
This project would not be possible without the generous contributions of colleagues who know far more about gardening, horticulture, and botany than I’ll ever be able to learn. Nor would it exist without Jere’s vision and unyielding passion for heirloom varieties.
Explore the entire series on YouTube.
And here’s a fun chat about the project with Katrina Krakow of Sow and Tare.
— Michelle