saving seeds
Among the wedding gifts we received last year, the money towards honeymoon and houseware, the decorative plates and expensive bedspreads, pieces of lace, picture-frames, the cards and envelopes of cash essential to Italian nuptials (a whole other essay there about gift economies) was an A4 concertina file in red cardboard proffered by two Swiss friends of my wife from university – friends of ours, now. Opened, it turned out that our friends had asked our guests to each provide seeds from a plant that meant something to them, something local, something beautiful or something delicious, a little packet of seeds, a brief description and growing advice, an illustration of the plant or its fruit; they had curated or compiled us a seed bank.
(You can tell something about what is important by looking at who is trying to destroy it. For decades industrial seed companies have stopped farmers from saving seed from the plants they grow in a ludicrous abuse of the principles of intellectual property, forcing them to come back each year to buy more. Seed saved gradually adapts itself to the land, needing less and less of the chemical nutrients, the weed control and the insect-killers the same companies sell.
