“I want to tell you about the most hopeful thing in the world. It is a seed.” – Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
When it comes to foodways preservation and environmental restoration, the small but mighty seed lives in the center of the Venn diagram. In Central Texas, a growing network of believers – including horticulturalists, plant conservationists, hobby gardeners, and librarians – are actively rallying to spread the gospel of seed saving. Says Colleen Dieter, the founder of Central Texas Seed Savers, “The magic of seeds is genetic information, and that’s what librarians are organizing.”
Dieter owns and operates her own business, Red Wheelbarrow Design, as a landscape consultant and horticulturist. What began as a personal garden project to continue growing delicious and well-adapted Armenian cucumbers morphed into a seed-saving mission. Founded in 2018, Central Texas Seed Savers – a grassroots project of nonprofit group Fruitful Commons – is dedicated to providing seeds to the Austin Public Library Seed Collection by organizing volunteers to collect, package, and share all kinds of fruit, vegetable, and native plant seeds.
Through the partnership, the city currently boasts 12 (and counting) seed collections at various neighborhood library branches and local business locations, each with a unique origin story. And the Central Branch Downtown is home to a very special project hub where librarians are cataloging and storing a variety of seeds in an eye-catching classic card catalog from the Austin History Center. The best part: Everyone is welcome to “check out and return” seeds from the Central Library Seed Collection and all of the seed libraries across town, for free. As public libraries do.
Kate Abel and Jace Furches are both adult services librarians for Austin Public Library Central Branch and gardeners to boot. Furches says of the alignment, “It promotes the sharing of seeds, and the sharing of seed knowledge. The library is promoting literacy and, historically, that’s been books principally. But now it’s come to be all kinds of literacy, including health literacy, cultural literacy, and environmental literacy. So this fits nicely in there. We see the seeds as nutritional and historical suitcases. The plants help nourish us, but they also provide cultural sustenance. So we say in our mission statement that seed collections like ours are intended to promote sustainability, self-sufficiency, food security, and interpersonal exchange.”
“The library is promoting literacy and, historically, that’s been books principally. But now it’s come to be all kinds of literacy, including health literacy, cultural literacy, and environmental literacy.” – Jace Furches, Austin Public Library
As the story goes, there was “a bit of serendipity” in how the Seed Savers and library partnership came together. “Kate is definitely a sustainability warrior” and was hoping to find more engagement opportunities, says Furches. Around the same time, in January 2018, Dieter had been taking classes and working with fellow seed swap volunteers at the Sustainable Food Center. That October, the first seed swap brought together more than 100 volunteers at the Central Branch, and in January 2019 the Central Library Seed Collection opened, followed by several other neighborhood libraries. Just before COVID shutdowns, their first fruit tree scion swap happened at Texas Keeper Cider. When the libraries were closed and swaps were not happening, Seed Savers shared more than 7,000 seed packets via food pantries, community gardens, porch pickups, and little seed libraries; the library branches offered virtual classes (still available on the website) and curbside pickup. Collectively, tens of thousands of seed packets have been shared since 2018, and the mission is growing stronger than ever with Seed Savers’ support from Fruitful Commons and APL’s gradual return to in-person programming and seed gatherings.
The list of reasons to save seeds is nearly as long as the list of seeds to save: With climate change and increasing pressures on nature, it is critical to protect culturally important (and delicious) varietals like the Tatume squash, which has survived generations to shape local foodways, Dieter says. It’s also about preserving plants that are well-adapted to Central Texas’ often harsh climate, and protecting less commercial varieties from extinction – something left to small-scale growers and home gardeners. Ideally the plants would be grown in isolation, harvested, and stored frozen in libraries, but more infrastructure and research are needed.
In addition to fruits and veggies, Seed Savers is also dedicated to initiatives for tree preservation, like a pilot program with TreeFolks aimed at improving diversity in the local tree canopy. They collect seeds for native species like walnut, emerald ash, and various nut and fruit trees. “Genetics are very complicated. That’s why scions and grafts are so important to preserve that genetic lineage. You can’t store that genetic info in a library; it must be stored in living trees – orchards, networks of yards – and mapped,” says Dieter.
Growing the network of growers and improving preservation abilities to resist the pressures on native plants is precisely what conservation biologist Minette Marr at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center does every day. An expert in plant identification, Marr is involved with all the different gardens across the center’s 284 acres and the 54 ongoing and ever-changing research points for land management. She says, “Some plants are introduced deliberately, some accidentally, and I try to keep us current with the current classification. But my favorite thing was always collecting seeds, especially walking with volunteers and landowners to collect seeds. It’s one thing for me to go out and make a seed collection. But it’s much more important to share that skill with other people, so they can pass it on.”
Essentially, the Wildflower Center Seed Bank works on two main types of collections. The first focuses on preservation of rare and habitat-specific plant populations at risk of extinction due to development and climate change. Marr says requests for small quantities of seeds (like 150) come from academia and scientists from across the globe for studies on genetics, distribution, and invasion. The second, formerly part of the Millennium Seed Bank funded through the Royal Botanic Gardens in the UK, focused on large amounts (10,000-20,000) of common species, often for restoration projects like in coastal regions post-hurricane. After the funding dried up, the Center has continued to partner with various projects, state and federal agencies, naturalist chapters and native plant societies, and even the Texas Forest Service nursery in Lubbock. But for the most part, large quantity efforts have previously been on hold. “We still have the seeds and we still share seeds,” Marr says, but this is why Dieter and the librarians’ work is so extremely important: The Wildflower Center hosts only two plant sales per year for fruits, vegetables, grasses, wildflowers, and more, so “grow outs” are slow-going, but, “Colleen works with people in their yard,” explains Marr. “She can take that same seed collection and immediately make a difference” with plants like deer-tolerant grasses, others that only grow on steep stony slopes, and some that tolerate junipers’ shade. And by making the seeds available through our public library system, versus a very formal scientific process, “they’re pushing them out there as soon as possible. And that’s powerful.
“It’s really important that there’s that quick turnaround on it because that way, the seeds are spread out amongst a lot of people that can grow [the plants] and then more seeds and it just expands. Each [location] represents a little island seed bank, hopefully,” says Marr. “People’s backyards might actually end up being much more diverse than some of our natural areas that don’t have protection from [factors like] deer. [Conservationist] Doug Tallamy has this idea [that] ‘our next national park is the collective of all of our backyards.’ And Colleen’s already doing that.”
Marr is also hopeful about the Wildflower Center’s new director of science and conservation, Shawn Griffin. With a background in habitat restoration and pollinators (specifically native bees), he is “finally” able to assess data from their 20-year project. Marr adds, “I think there will be a much-needed emphasis on collecting seeds for the wildflowers and grasses that we know pollinators use.” Knowing which areas need which plants (like milkweed on butterfly migration paths) aids in cultivating availability lists, and sharing info with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Native American groups with large-scale growing capacities helps create robust collections.
“I’ve had this crazy dream and everybody just kind of shakes their head, but for years I’ve been pushing that we should collaborate with H-E-B,” Marr says. “Habitat for H, enhancement for E, Bees for B. Or Butterflies!” They would need a huge volume of seeds, “but if I keep talking about it, somebody’s gotta do it. Because when you’re sharing information, you’re building capacity.”
Discovering new options for home gardens is an added bonus – plants that most people don’t think of when they think of Central Texas but grow really well here. Popular seeds to “check out” include the usual suspects like basil, cilantro, tomatoes, and kale. Kate Abel says, “Any kind of wildflower seeds get checked out just as fast as they’re added to the collection, and sunflowers, poppies, bluebonnets, blanket flowers, they all fly out of the drawers.” She added they have some “weird” seeds, too, like peanuts, which grow really well in Texas. Furches started seed saving with longneck squash from a swap and says, “Sharing that magic and wonder, it’s so easy – seeds are so generous.”
Local orgs like Seed Savers and their partnerships with community resources like the public library will shape the future of seed preservation networks, including seed banking.
Local orgs like Seed Savers and their partnerships with community resources like the public library will shape the future of seed preservation networks, including seed banking. From the Seed Collection’s library page: “Imagine a network of freezers all over Central Texas storing a collection of rare, valuable seeds. We don’t need a vault in an arctic mountain. We just need a corner of your freezer for a quart jar full of seeds.” The network of freezers connects to growers to preserve genetics, then distribute, then database. Abel says, “We’re not a seed bank in the traditional sense that we’re holding seeds for perpetuity. It really is intended to get them into people’s hands. And at the same time, folks aren’t required to return anything.”
Everyone involved strongly encourages folks to get involved in any capacity they’re able. The seeds are labeled in packets in the drawers and people can take home four at a time by simply filling out the little form. Donations can be given to library staff or Seed Saver volunteers, and all volunteer skills are welcome – carpenters, sewers for cotton-saving bags, packaging, driving, and collecting. Furches adds, “The seeds are free and you can always plant more, so I always encourage people not to be afraid. All you need to do is start by putting some seeds in the ground and giving them some water and sunlight. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You just learn along the way. It’s really important, that exchange – not only of seeds, but of knowledge.”
For more information, you remember the drill: Just ask a librarian. Find this story online for advice on seed saving from Jennymarie Jemison of Joy Max Jardín and for more resources.
This article appears in April 22 • 2022.