by Ray, Janisse
“Well, it’s not seven years,” he said. “It’s seven generations. If you’re working in a warmer climate such as where you live or in a greenhouse, you may get two generations in a year.”
“Okay, seven generations,” I say. “But why?”
“When you make a cross,” he said, “and save the seed, it takes a number of years for the seed to grow true. Each year your seed gets closer and closer to the characteristics you desire. Basically it’s a matter of statistics. On average, the process takes about seven years.”
I was still in the dark.
“Let’s say that with the first generation you’re 20 percent of the way toward the characteristics you desire. The next generation, you’re 30 percent, then 40 percent, then 50 percent. In seven generations, you’ll be 95 percent of the way toward true.”
“Is it always seven generations?”
“No,” Tom said. “If you’re crossing two similar varieties, let’s say two red slicing tomatoes, both determinate, you may stabilize the cross in three or four generations. But if your cross is wide, if you’re crossing a red slicing tomato with an orange cherry, for example, it will take seven generations and maybe more.”
“Now I understand,” I said and thanked him.
There are different places to draw the line about what kinds of seeds you will embrace and those you will not. Bonsall draws the line at hybrids. Even as he avows this, somewhere at Khadighar some plant is hybridizing, without a doubt. I’m sure it’s happening, accidentally. It happens all the time. Folk growers have been producing happenchance hybrids for centuries, hence all the agricultural diversity to start with. No doubt about it, thoroughbred is inbred. But for Bonsall, inbreeding maintains purity.
Many small and organic operations draw the line at GM and they don’t think twice about planting hybrids. Johnny’s Selected Seeds, to name one example, which caters to the market gardener, appears to offer more hybrids than standard varieties. One afternoon while in residence at Pace University in 2010 I was touring Stone Barns, the Pocantico Hills, New York, estate of David Rockefeller that has become an apprentice farm and home of the most famous farm-to-table restaurant in America, Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Executive director Jill Isenbarger told me that the farm is a center of experimentation for new hybrid seeds; in fact, she could only think of two heirlooms being grown that season, Otto File corn and Panther soy. To grow hybrids is to accept that most seeds are a product of hybridization—“to see what happens,” says the Stone Barns newsletter, in the “spirit of artful innovation.”
But for Bonsall, hybridization equals industrialization, and he isn’t willing to go there.
Bonsall is a regional curator for the Seed Savers Exchange. He has chosen to keep alive some very difficult seeds. “Beans and tomatoes—that’s the seed most people save. For one thing, they’re sexy crops, all annuals, all self-pollinators,” Bonsall says. “But I specialize in two-hoop crops.”
He doesn’t wait for one of us to ask what he means.
“You have to jump through two hoops to get the seeds,” he explains. “These plants are mostly biennials. The first year you plant the seeds, then you must overwinter the plant. They go back into the ground, flower, and make seed.”
To trespass against the rules of biennial reproduction would be to ruin a lineage. And rules there are aplenty, enough to boggle a mind. Here are some of the rules. Plants cross-pollinate. Even though they look and taste so different, beets and chards cross, since both belong to the same genus, species, and subspecies—Beta vulgaris vulgaris. Beet and chard pollen is fine, evolved for wind pollination, and these plants must be separated by two to five miles for absolute purity. Alternately, their flowers may be bagged.
“Bag?” I interrupt.
“To cover a hand-pollinated flower with a thin bag in order to prevent cross-pollination. If a plant is insect-pollinated, it’s more difficult to maintain seed purity.”
“Got it,” I say.
Bonsall continues his litany. Roots stored overwinter in cellars must not freeze. They must be replanted the next spring back into the ground before they rot. “All these rules are kind of difficult to follow,” Bonsall says. The difficulty explains why fewer people save the seeds of biennials. Bonsall curates Brussels sprouts and leeks for the Seed Savers Exchange. “For better or for worse,” he says. “And mostly worse.” He is also keeping alive a variety of Swiss chard that’s from a former East German pre–World War II town. “The people who grew it are rotting in some mass grave,” Bonsall says. He pauses, not long enough for anyone to ask a question.
“Gulp.” It is not a real gulp. “I better not frig up. There’s a very great danger in so much genetic base in one place. If this house burned down, there would be a hell of a lot of extinction.”
“So many of the varieties are doubtlessly identical,” I say to Bonsall. “They simply have different names. Why not test them and reduce the collection?”
“The DNA testing is costly and inefficient. Once some testing was done on the Seed Savers Exchange’s potato varieties. The idea was to throw the repetition away and keep only unlike varieties. The best they could ever find out was, ‘Yes, this potato really is different.’ They could never find a test that said, ‘Yes, it really is the same.’ Essentially, then, a seed saver can never throw anything away. What the potato people were looking for was simplification,” Bonsall says. “The virtue in simplicity is that it’s easier. It’s also very dangerous. There is safety in complexity. There is always strength in complexity. I am wacko into diversity,” Bonsall says. “The more, the merrier.”
Bonsall changes course. “Speaking of simplicity,” he says. “People used to say that I’m living a simple life. But the supposed simple life is very complex. Every single hour I have to stop and rethink, ‘What am I doing?’ The options are constantly changing. This is a very complex life.”
We finally head uphill to the main seed gardens. Past a fencerow a splendid wooden wheelbarrow lies forlornly out in the weather, sun and rain and snow. Bonsall said he built it with an apprentice. They went to a museum for the design and used ash for the spokes, elm for the wheel, and cedar for the box.
The garden is in complete disarray. A week earlier Bonsall hired a young man to come and try to make sense of a few things, he says. Rows are weeded about twenty feet in, enough for viewing, and the rest is left to wilderness.
The potato collection is over seven hundred varieties. We can’t really see the potato vines. They are swallowed by weeds, which Bonsall admits got out of hand with all the rainy weather that summer. “They’ll be okay,” he says. “We just want them to survive and make a few tubers.”
“I’m amazed at how few of the varieties you can get commercially anymore,” he continues. “There are a few where this is the last place on the planet you can get them. And frankly, that scares the shit out of me. If I lose them, they will be gone from the planet.”
Frankly, that scares the shit out of me too, because I can’t even see the potatoes. I spot some sickly, frail plants dog-deep in brush.
Bonsall admits that he’s overwhelmed. He’s fifty-nine now, unable to work as hard as he once did. Income from seed-sample orders and occasional grants are not enough to maintain all this diversity on a sustainable basis.
“You maintain every single variety that comes your way?” I ask Bonsall.
“This is Noah’s ark,” he says. “I’m Noah. I’m not God. I don’t get to make the decisions about what to put on the ark. Maybe later we’ll say, ‘Whoa, it’s a good thing we didn’t lose that during the Monsanto era.’ A variety may not be hardy here but it might be great someplace else. It may have a very valuable gene. I don’t want to put values on these things. It’s not up to me to make that judgment.”
Bonsall’s a man of metaphor, and he finishes his hour-long monologue with a flourish. “I’m trying to juggle a co
uple thousand balls here. I can’t let any fall on the ground, even though I may not be great at juggling. I’m fighting a battle I’m doomed to lose,” he says. Then he shrugs lightly. “But that’s what life is.” He hopes seed savers “develop their skills with the more challenging crops and join me in protecting these undercurated crops.” As for the potatoes, in 2008 the Seed Savers Exchange began a project to back up the potato varieties at Khadighar with laboratory tissue cultures for long-term storage.
We leave Bonsall juggling over seven hundred varieties of potatoes, over fifty of Jerusalem artichokes, over four hundred peas, over fifty radishes, and five leeks—all up in the air in his big orgy of a garden.
— 9 —
sylvia’s garden
AT THE ENTRANCE to Sylvia Davatz’s garden grows the largest known white oak in Vermont. In the oak’s branches robins are singing and all around, the green of summer is its own animal.
Before us, in an area a few hundred feet square, this elegant woman maintains about 150 varieties of garden plants. A series of paths thread between narrow raised beds configured to maximize sunlight and space. Sylvia wins the “neatest garden” award. Her beds are planted meticulously and evenly. Twelve lettuces spangle a weedless section, next to a chopping block of onions, next to a chessboard of cress. Although intensely organized, the garden still manages to go nuts, and a strange, dazzling red-leaved plant has sprung up in crannies and edges. “Red orach, similar to lamb’s-quarter,” Sylvia says. (Both are in the Chenopodium family, cousins to quinoa.) She pulls off a crinkled, arrowhead-shaped leaf and hands it to me. The leaf tastes like spinach, with less oxalic acid.
Sylvia was born in Switzerland. Her father was an American representative for a company that made surveying and other precision instruments. Sylvia grew up in the United States but her family returned to Switzerland when she was sixteen. “When I was a kid I read Swiss Family Robinson,” she said, “and I was absolutely smitten by the ideas of self-reliance and resourcefulness.” After eight years in Switzerland, Sylvia flew back to the United States and tended her first garden in 1978 in Milton, Massachusetts. As the years passed, she began to see pet varieties disappearing from seed catalogs. Seeds were being lost. They were being displaced by hybrids, taken over by corporations. To save them was a basic but necessary skill, and Sylvia began to see herself as a steward of seeds.
“A lot of people are just beginning to garden and already thinking about seed saving,” Sylvia continues. “This gives me a lot of hope, since it means awareness is growing about how important the work is. I came to it much more gradually.”
“Was it difficult to switch from gardening to seed saving?” I ask.
“There’s definitely a shift in awareness of timing and the need for observation. It feels like learning a new Romance language: I already know French but am learning Spanish. The grammar is the same but the words are different.”
In this moment I’m distracted, trying to listen to a very thoughtful gardener and, at the same time, experience every inch of her garden. We come to a bed of True Red Cranberry, a pole bean she obtained from Abundant Life Seed Company in 1997, when the variety was rare, before it made a grand comeback. “I tell new gardeners to start with simple things, self-pollinators like peas and beans. All you need to do to save legumes is let them dry on the vine.”
We stop at a drift of zucchini. “I grow only one variety at a time,” says Sylvia.
“Because they cross easily?”
“Yes, it’s a challenge to keep varieties pure. And I plant only one species of winter squash a year.”
“Which one, may I ask?”
“Red Kuri.” Red Kuri is a thick-skinned, deep-orange winter squash that is popular in Japan. “Interestingly, without my knowing it, my sister in Switzerland’s favorite squash is Pôtimarron, which looks identical to Red Kuri. This year I decided to grow both, to see which is best. But only one is here. The other is in a friend’s garden.”
It is soon obvious that Sylvia is an experimenter, an emblem of a fine mind.
“My latest project,” she says, “is the search for two outstanding onions, a yellow one and a red one, that will be particularly suited to our area.” She explains that onions are biennials, meaning they flower and produce seeds in their second year. So to get seeds, the root must be stored for the winter and then replanted, after which the plant will flower, then set seeds. “Last year I grew fifteen different onions. I stored them in the root cellar. I have records of when they broke dormancy.”
“I don’t see fifteen different onions here.” I look around.
“Oh,” she smiles. “I parceled them out to friends to grow. I’m growing to seed in different gardens.”
“Are these friends all over the country?”
“Most are right here in Hartland, Vermont. I want to be profoundly local.” I like that: profoundly local.
We pick our way across the garden to see the onion variety Sylvia chose for herself: Southport Red Globe. It grows straight and green, flush with life. “When the little husks around each of the seeds begin to dry out, I will collect them. Of each onion variety I will ask: Does it grow well? Does it store well? Does it taste good? Does it produce seed within one season, with the climate we have here?”
In this experiment Sylvia is a plant selector, not a breeder. Breeding involves producing a specific target. “What I’m doing feels more like a partnership, letting the plant express itself.” She talks about phenotype, which means observable traits, and genotype, which is genetic makeup. “Plants will respond in one season to my circumstances. Maybe there’s different soil, a different elevation, something slightly different from the place the plant previously grew. Traits hidden because of conditions can surface,” she said. “For example, I got a leek from William Woys Weaver. It was originally hardy only to Zone 7. After growing it for a number of years and selecting for seed production the plants that survived winter, it’s now winter-hardy here in Vermont. It still looks exactly like the leek I got,” she continued. “But I can leave it in the ground all winter. That leek had the genetic capabilities of adjusting to this place.”
Sylvia has another idea for an experiment. She wants to grow Sheepnose pepper and allow it to adapt year by year to her central Vermont environment. At the same time, she will save some original Sheepnose pepper seeds for ten years in a freezer and then grow them out. She wants to compare the two peppers. Are they the same? Or has the grown-out pepper slowly and visibly altered itself?
Like seed, each of us has traits hidden deep inside that under the right conditions can emerge. Any of us can be selected and developed. We can become the people we’ve always wanted to become. We can respond and adjust, sure, but even more important, we can express ourselves. We can become something even stronger and more useful than we were before.
I’d heard Sylvia was working on dehybridizing the Sungold tomato. I’ve come to talk to her about this. Sungold is a popular tomato—a thin-skinned, orange cherry developed by the Tokita Seed Company of Japan—that I reject in my garden because it is a hybrid, obtainable only by purchase. By growing Sungold every year and selecting for the desired characteristics, Sylvia hoped to have a stable, open-pollinated version after about seven years. These seeds would produce Sungold tomatoes that would be open-source, in the public domain.
“I stopped that project,” she says now.
I wait, hand poised over my notebook at a bed of arugula.
“The Sungolds always cracked,” she said. “But Tim Peters of Peters Seed and Research developed Sweet Orange II that is totally crack-free. And Plumgold emerged in one of the years I was working. With great tomatoes like that, there was no need for my project to continue.” I subsequently learned that other breeders have used a parent line of Sungold in order to create an open-pollinated version of this variety, including Tom Wagner, who bred Flaming Juane and Flamme Burst.
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In Sylvia’s garden I saw things I’d never seen before: salsify with its purple flowers and also Scorzonera hispanica, black salsify or oyster plant, nothing most people would plant in a flower garden but a rage of yellow flowers.
Sylvia turns. “Look at these little flowers with their little green tips. I mean, I ask you . . . ” And she doesn’t need to finish.
She pauses beside spinach. “Not many people realize,” she says, “that it has male and female plants.” She shows me the difference, using plants that overwintered under snow. “Once the seeds begin to mature, the male plants die back.” This is important to know. I hadn’t known it. Yet I had seen spinach plants dying without producing seeds and I had wondered. “The pollen is so fine it’s like face powder,” Sylvia says.
There is so much to learn, I am thinking.
“One of the fun things I am trying to do here is to garden as if we no longer had oil,” Sylvia says.
“Why?” I ask. It is, of course, a rhetorical question.
“Because soon we won’t have any!” She laughs, not because she thinks this is funny but as if the line requires some emotion and she can no longer cry about the fact we have reached the zenith of global oil production, and from here on out, we have to learn to live without it, because oil will get more and more scarce, and thus more costly. The laugh is wry.
I am reminded of a Christmas card my friend Susan Murphy received. It said, “Words for a post-petroleum economy: It’s been a great party, but it’s time to go home! Home to our grandparents’ ways: growing our vegetables, traveling less, treasuring home, family, and friends more.” That doesn’t sound like a Christmas card, but it was.
“You’re a hero,” I say now to Sylvia.
“Just a gardener,” she replies.
She asks if I want to see the seed collection and I do, so we go inside to the basement, where a series of dorm refrigerators are filled with neatly organized bags and packets. Sylvia is cultivating a group of gardeners to be curators of this collection. They meet monthly, share seeds and gardening know-how, and work on collaborative projects to preserve worthy and endangered varieties. Sylvia’s little seed bank could replenish a region, start a lot of gardens, feed a lot of people, which is what makes this remarkable woman a revolutionary and an activist, although she might never call herself those things. What she would say is that she’s just trying to keep all of us well-fed.