The Latest Dirt - March 2024

The Triumph of Seeds: A Book Review

By Liz Rottger

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.
--George Bernard Shaw,
The Vegetarian Diet According to Shaw (1918)

Several years ago, I joined a group of volunteers called “Seedy Friends” at the East Bay Regional Botanic Garden in Tilden to help collect seeds from some of its native plants—columbine, milkweeds, Clarkias, Phacelias, poppies, etc. I soon had a healthy respect for all the diverse strategies plants have developed to protect their ‘young’ and assure their distribution. Collecting the seeds was only half the job, the easy part. Cleaning them was a whole other sea of hard work—long, tedious hours spent shaking different-sized scalper screens and tiny-holed sieve screens to get even a few clean seeds we could package up and sell for $2/pkg at the Garden. I thought $25/pkg might have been a fairer price for all our work!

My appreciation for seeds has only deepened after reading Thor Hanson’s The Triumph of Seeds [Basic Books, 2015]. Mr. Hanson is a wonderful storyteller, and he takes his readers from seed storage vaults to the Spice Islands, the Galapagos, and the rain forests of Costa Rica, where he searches for almendro seeds. He examines several individual plants’ cultural and economic history and their highly successful seeds: cocoa, coffee, cotton, peppers, castor beans and wheat. They have all changed the world we live in. He revisits the work of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin and introduces us to the research of prominent modern-day seed scientists. His detailed endnotes and lengthy bibliography demonstrate the careful documentation upon which Mr. Hanson has based this highly readable book.

Mr. Hanson has a simple but memorable description of a seed: “a baby plant in a box with its lunch,” portable, protected, and well-provisioned for its journey. He carefully dissects the biology of seeds from development to dormancy to germination. He illuminates seeds’ evolutionary path, giving seed plants immediate advantages as the climate changes. The protective ‘box’ (carpel) or leaf tissue that plants wrapped their naked seeds in meant that they could now wait for the right conditions to germinate and grow. The explosion of angiosperms (Greek for “seeds in a vessel”) that occurred in the early Cretaceous has made them the vast majority of today’s plant life and caused Darwin in 1879 to call their sudden appearance an “abominable mystery.”

But Mr. Hanson also answers some of those vexing questions gardeners always have. Why do I seem to pull out the same weeds time and time again from the same patch in my garden? How long will this go on? Why does it take so long for parsley seeds to germinate? Why do seeds come in all shapes and sizes? How does seed dormancy work? Why are some chili peppers hot and others not, and which came first: the hot chili pepper or the sweet chili pepper? Why do seeds germinate only at certain times of the year? We love sinking our teeth into a soft peach or a ripe pear as if this was made just for us, but Mr. Hanson reminds us that the fruit’s tasty flesh was just a successful strategy plants developed to disperse their seeds.

Throughout, he always retains sight of the cultural significance of seeds for the development of humanity. We were first seed gatherers, and then we became farmers. “Seeds embody the biology of passing things down.” For those of us who save seeds, there’s a connection between seasons and next year’s harvest. Seeds also form a tangible connection to future generations we will never meet, but who will use these saved seeds to grow the crops we love.