Great Expectations for Seed Keeping with Garden Futurist Jennifer Jewell

There were a couple reasons for that. It was important to me that I had very personal skin in the game, because that personal access point I think is where we find motivation to act in the best interest of all of us and of our environment and places.

So that was the first reason I used the journal entries about my life with John a lot in his place, which has become my place. It is an oak woodland canyon with a little year-round creek that runs through it. And I use it not only as where I stake my intention to be the best gardener and steward I can, but also as this macrocosm for the larger world, like you can look at this one little prescribed place and it has so many little microclimates and little ecosystems. It has agriculture, it has mining, it has colonization.

I sit, I produce my podcast, and do my work, and live my life on unceded homeland territory of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of the Chico Rancheria here at the Mechoopda Maidu here in Interior Northern California. There is all evidence of their lives and histories in this canyon. So there is water, there is a seed shed, there are invasive plants, there are colonizers.

So, there was a way to talk about some of the bigger issues in our horticultural world, our scientific world, and our just socioeconomic world from just this one tiny place. And I think that if anyone listening to this looks at their own place, they can do the same. It kind of comes back to that beautiful reflection by Jamaica Kincaid, that when you look at your garden and the plants you have assembled there as well as your personal history in that place, the whole world and its history is there with you, right?

Now there’s a third reason too, Sarah, and I think that people will notice it when they read the book. There is a great relief when you get to the personal entries after you have slogged through a complicated discussion on the history of seed libraries or seed banks or GMOs or pesticide-coated seeds, to finally get back to Jennifer and John doing their little garden thing. You’re like, “Oh, okay now we’re here again good I can just rest for a second.”

I hope in some way that that is a reminder to everybody that if we ground ourselves in our places, we are sustained for the bigger advocacy and activism we want to hold.

Sarah Beck: I think there’s something very valuable and I think most gardeners have a sense of that—that understanding the place you are, getting to know the place you are. Truly knowing the seasonal cycles and the plant reproductive cycles where you live, the things that are your familiar plant friends.

Jennifer Jewell: I would go off into the ether on these things, like the controversies around the opening of Svalbard, or the history of the Bayer Monsanto Corporation, and I think this is true for all of us in our everyday life, like, we can get swept away by how much loss and devastation and political fatigue and economic and global sadness and grief and chaos, right?

But you can also still walk outside, and those 250-year-old oak trees are still coloring up for the fall and their acorns are there. And the acorn woodpeckers are yelling about who gets which acorn. It reminds us that these seed-bearing plants, specifically the angiosperms, the flowering seed-bearing plants, they’ve been at this game of survival and reproduction and collaboration and competition and migration patterns for 365 million years, right?

They know stuff, and they’re still here. And there’s something very calming about that. For me, it’s the embodiment of faith. Like, I have faith in them, even when I fail to sometimes have faith in human endeavors.

Sarah Beck: I did find that as you go deeper in your research, seed conservation itself, it’s not just a theme, it becomes a central conversation. We do talk a lot about biodiversity loss and climate change, and these are very common conversations to have with plants as a contextual part of that conversation. But I am curious if you were surprised at all, as you went deeper into this research. Even though this is a familiar topic, I don’t get the sense that there is a huge amount of public discourse that involves the seed conservation part of this conversation.

Jennifer Jewell: The first thing is I come back to this binary. I’m trying really hard not to go there, because one of the things that’s clear in my seed shed here in the canyon with John is that seed is both powerfully good, and it is also—in the wrong place at the wrong time, introduced by the wrong people—also devastating, right?

So it’s powerfully potentially good and powerfully potentially devastating. And by that, I mean the many, many often horticultural introductions of invasive plants that have decimated or just contaminated our native landscapes to the detriment of the native biodiversity in those places. But one of the things from this last 20 years of studying seed, getting to know seed, being impressed and awed by seed is how many times it gets siloed into these different pockets.

I think in part that has to do with, that is an efficient way to think about it., because you have many conversations in the world about the loss of heirloom—and I’m saying “loss” because there’s some discussion in there, too—of biodiversity in our passed-down, home-garden-level food crops. At the turn of the century, there were 500 tomato varieties or cucumbers or winter squashes. We talk about that and we see that.

So there is a lot of work from Seed Savers Exchange to Slow Food and their seed summits and Stone Barns and people on the western side of the continent working on refinding, replanting, resharing the edible foods of the Asian diaspora, of the African diaspora, of, of course, the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. Most of these are focused on the diversity of food that we as humans have selected over the last several centuries, if not millennia.

What was interesting to me interviewing some of the big seed scientists, like Dr. John Dickie out of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in England, Dr. Stephanie Greene and Dr. Christina Walters at the USDA seed bank—which has a much longer name, but let’s just call it that—in Fort Collins, and Dr. Colin Khoury, who is now at the San Diego Botanical Garden, and then Gary Nabhan.

The separation of our food crops from our native plant seed restoration work, I understand why they’ve been siloed because they have different pragmatics to their conservation and their restoration or disbursement out into the world, but when we reconnect them, we see and we remember that all food crops hail back from a wild food progenitor, a wild crop progenitor in our native landscapes.

So all of a sudden, the home vegetable garden—which seems sort of different than pollinator or biodiversity conservation—is actually the same. They just have a slightly different face to them.

And I think for me, what kept coming up over and over again was—much in the same way that Dr. Doug Tallamy has been able to show to us this very specific food chain relationship between the insects and caterpillars and their larval food to our larger biodiversity and the importance of them—it seems to me that if we can get our hundred million households in the US to also understand their seed better. Because it’s that articulated joint from which all these other things flow, whether it’s food crops, ecosystem restoration, or invasive plant control, they all come back to how we care for seed and what we understand about it.

Sarah Beck: This is probably a good point to share, at least in broad strokes, where some of those divisions are in the history of caring for seed. I think if this book were to distill, “Okay, here are some top things that the gardener or the person who is interested in this topic should just know and understand from the beginning.”

I think it is really important to understand a little bit of this history of how this division between conservation of agricultural crop seed, and then the conversation about species diversity and preservation generally, how these pieces actually have been on fairly parallel tracks.

I wouldn’t describe this as common knowledge. I feel like not a lot of people have the opportunity to really look at it, because again, they’re in totally different fields. If you’re in that world where the USDA germplasm story is, you’re probably not in the world as much where a lot of this general biodiversity and habitat-level ecology conversation is, right?

Jennifer Jewell: Right, and I think you will be well familiar with this, but one of the things that is very clear to me in our horticultural world is we have these very steadfast, very active and very determined groups that sometimes can’t seem to come together to be a bigger whole.

One of those are the edible food crop gardeners, right? “We need to feed the world. We need to feed our neighborhoods. We need to feed ourselves so we have self-sufficiency,” which I love. Beautiful.

Then we have the native plant people and they are over here saying, “We have to rebuild biodiversity. We have to reintegrate ourselves with the native plant world and support this loss and support these insects and support clean air and clean water through those efforts.” Also great. I love them, but they’re in fact on the same page, but they are coming at it from two different angles. Again, perfectly efficient and good.

I think if we as gardeners can understand that they can and do come together with the way we think, the way we vote, the way we spend our dollars, which is also voting, that they’re not they aren’t two different things. We can do both really, really well in our home gardens for the better of both advocacies.

A lot of it comes down to sociopolitical forces and the urgency of empire building, to be very clear, and that dates back to certainly the 1800s, and it definitely dates back earlier than that to all colonial endeavors.

It is clear in all of world history that no matter who the empire might have been and what they were trying to take over, they had two objectives that furthered their cause. One was: secure your own food supply so you can feed your people and your troops. The second was: target the food supply of other people that you are trying to dominate because if you control their food, you control them.

To feed your people, good impulse. To dominate other people by taking away their food, kind of a shitty impulse.

So, you get to the late 1800s in Russia and the Russian leadership at that point understand that they want to protect the genetics of their most staple, best agricultural crops so they can support their empire building at the moment.

They institute what is considered to be the first of the seed banks in our world. From there until really the mid-20th century, you are looking at most seed banks being focused on collecting, protecting, and then sharing as necessary or breeding and researching as necessary, the best agricultural food crops.

This was true across the globe. So it was true in the US, it was true in the UK, it was true in Russia, and then large groups and governments got together and said, “We need to secure the global biodiversity of food crops in some of these key areas around the world,” such as the hub of wheat diversity and other dry land crops in the Middle East. The diversity of rice crops in the Philippines, I believe, is where that one is located.

So it goes on from there. And it’s not until about the mid-1900s that we see this expanding into seed banks that are also looking to secure the genetics—in seed or other germplasm form—for the biodiversity of places. This really ramps up in the 1990s with the first convention on biodiversity and agreement of nations to try and collect, preserve, share the biodiversity of regions.

Sarah Beck: I think it’s probably important to add about the Nagoya Protocol in this because if you are in the US, your home country did not participate in some of this decision making.

Jennifer Jewell: It was heartbreaking. So the Nagoya Protocol was crafted, worked on, edited, recrafted, revoted on at a UN convention in one of these conventions on biodiversity. It brought, I think, 151 countries and subgroups  signed that protocol determining that each of those places would make big strides toward protecting, collecting, preserving, identifying, and sharing with other people the seed biodiversity of their place.

The United States did not sign this protocol agreeing to this because they were worried about the economic fallout. To be quite honest—I’ll be blunt, and this is my opinion and not the opinion of the program you’re listening to, necessarily—but they wanted to make sure that we protected our profits in going in and exploiting resources in other countries, instead of first focusing on protecting biodiversity around the world.

Sarah Beck: This is where the story goes next, I think, this conversation about who owns something or can we even own certain things is an interesting set of questions that you do a great job asking.

Just to stay at this high level, it is very interesting how one of those key components of that protocol really had to do with sharing, benefit sharing, and this idea that within the fruits of the earth, these are things that we can’t keep from one another, especially if there’s some greater benefit to humanity.

So I do want to jump to some of the profiles that you do in the book. These are really the big players in this world that you talk to, and it’s fascinating how many different perspectives you gather from these different places. We’ll just call them seed people, because obviously they’re scientists and conservationists, and there are grassroots activists, and there’s people who are really working on a community level.

So I should mention Dr. Colin Khoury was on our last episode of the Garden Futurist podcast. So, this is a really nice segue into thinking about some of these different layers of what seed people do. Colin talked to us about crop wild relatives.

We actually did briefly touch on USDA National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins. That’s where Dr. Stephanie Greene is, the curator, and others. That is a facility that does have an open source sharing component, which is the GRIN Global Network. I hate acronyms so I’m always going to say them: Germplasm Resources Information Network. That is open source, it’s an information site.

You mentioned Gary Nabhan, whose work and many others as well, in terms of the native seed SEARCH—and oh gosh, maybe you can help me. SEARCH is also an acronym, is it not?

Jennifer Jewell: It is. Southwestern Endangered Aridland Resources Clearing House.

Sarah Beck: The reason I bring these up is just because I think there are seed people working at a lot of different scales that you talk about. You’ve got these big banks, and then you also have smaller libraries. Do you just have some insight into what the roles for all of these different scales of seed work are?

Jennifer Jewell: I’m going to apply an analogy or a metaphor here with the seed world.

In any ecosystem, you have the big keystone species, the big charismatic species. So let’s take my ecosystem. We’re talking about the oaks and the pines. They’re the big players, the big growers. You then have your shrubs, and then you have your groundcovers, and then you have your perennial herbaceous, and your grasses, and then you have your annuals, and then you have your geophytes.

They all have different numbers of seeds. They all have different seed dispersal mechanisms. They all have different roles to play in the ecosystem. And we stinking need them all.

And this is true of the seed people. We need Dr. Christina Walters overseeing with Stephanie Greene, the seed bank of the US and keeping an eye because while we do have GRIN, and it is open source, you have to know what you’re talking about in order to go into GRIN and get what you want out of it, right? Whereas, as soon as Dr. Walters and Dr. Greene became truly cognizant of how many seeds are in the seed bank that are perhaps culturally significant to tribal peoples across the continent, they have begun looking for these people, these groups wanting to access seed and they are tagging that seed so it’s easier for you to find it on GRIN.

Open access sounds great, but if it has barriers like technology use and nomenclature issues, then it’s not really open. So you need those people, but you also need Owen Taylor and Chris Bolden-Newsome on the ground in Philadelphia saying, how do we bring cultural and food and economics together to the better of the greater Philadelphia and world, right? You need all these layers of people looking out in their own places, just like you need every gardener on the ground to do what they can, where they are for the environment and for food and for culture and beauty. And if you just go out and play in your garden today, use no chemicals and feed one butterfly, like you’re doing it.