What the Garden and Seed Saving Teaches Us

An act of collaboration with nature.

Cupped in my palm, caught in the furrowed creases of my hand, are seeds. Their irregularly spherical shapes feel satisfying on my skin when gently rolled with my forefinger as I examine their seemingly delicate forms. I reflect on what I am holding. Life. In each of these tiny specks is what’s needed for a new plant to grow. Incredible.

Only months ago, I held their forebears. Seemingly identical to my eye and with the distance of time between spring and autumn. But yet I know that they aren’t identical. Not quite. For these seeds, I have saved from plants I have grown myself. And as they’ve grown, they’ve adapted — to my soil, to my climate, to my garden. Some thrived, some didn’t. But the ones that did, I saved seed from. I know that next year, when I pop these seeds in the soil, they will know this place. And hopefully, again, they will thrive.

I’ve come to learn that saving seed is an utterly enriching experience — an empowering one, even. There’s a cyclical participation that feels, well, as it should. In the springtime, I plant the seed; I help the plant grow throughout the summer and in turn it gifts me its fruits; come autumn, I collect the seed; and in a few months, we start again. A personal relationship forms. There’s collaboration. There’s reciprocity. Sure, at times it can feel like parenting a petulant child or a grumpy teenager. But ask nearly any parent and they’ll tell you, the rewards and good feels far outweigh the bad.

Why is it empowering, though? Well, what most people don’t know is that most commercial seed for food crops — that includes your garden centre seed and that from many seed catalogues — was created by design. They are hybrids, selectively bred in lab conditions to make the most desirable produce. But desirable for whom? Often the suppliers and retailers. Desirable traits may include: tough skins, doesn’t bruise easily, can be transported long distances, can be stored for long times. They may not include: taste and nutrition.

Some of these hybrid varieties were created decades ago and haven’t changed since. But this isn’t how nature works. Nature adapts and evolves. It moves through its iterative cycles, learning. Learning how to respond to its environment. Hybrids don’t learn. They can’t — they’ve been designed not to and therefore you can’t save seed from them. My open-pollinated varieties, on the other hand, do learn. In fact, we learn together.

This year, as we’ve been shut away from the world amid a global pandemic, many of us have come to see how important nature is to us. In the stricter days of lockdown, we clutched at our one-hour allotted time for outdoor exercise. Many of us walked places we’d never before, despite them being on our doorsteps. A lot of us slowed down, perhaps for the first time in years or even our adult lives. We began to see things differently and notice more. The unfolding of leaves in spring. The birds returning. The tree blossom blooming. Many of those fortunate enough to have access to a garden space turned their hand to the soil. It was a year of many first-time gardeners — hurray. We returned to nature.

Pre-pandemic, so many of us were caught up in a pace of life that, in my opinion, is unhuman. We behaved like robots. And expected others to do so as well. We ran at capacity. We burnt out, regularly. We rushed and rarely had time for the things that mattered, the things that make us feel good, the things that make us human. It was, simply said, unnatural.

But we are nature. We are a part of the natural world, whether we like it or not. We aren’t robots. This year, in a time I most needed it, the garden reminded me of this. In fact, the garden has so much to teach us, if only we are willing to listen. It teaches us that life is a collaboration. The environmental rhetoric reads that humans are a plague on our planet. Certainly, there’s no denying that our species is destructive, but that destruction is a product of our culture not our humanity. In all our humanity, we crave to be with and work with other beings. We share space with them. We care for them. And in turn, they care for us.

As I usher my collected seeds into a brown paper envelope and turn down the flap, I relish in the thought that I am a custodian of life in its most delicate form. And I will store them safely until our collaboration continues in spring.

Rachel Taylor

If you are interested in seed saving, please note that you must save seed from plants grown from real, open-pollinated seed. In the UK, you can buy this seed from places like Real Seeds and Vital Seeds — the latter of which is where I get mine from.

Like my writing and want to find out more about me? Head to rachelmariataylor.com. My mission is to help create and build culture around nature connection, environmental stewardship and regenerative living.

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