Introduction : The Seed Garden
The great thing about native plants is that when they’re used for their intended purpose, seeds appear. These seeds are in fact the fruit of many beings’ labor, who work in silence or nearly so. Pollination is the goal, the guarantee of success, and the way to infinitely reproduce your garden. And all this is possible through seed exchange.
Put simply, native seeds are easier to spread in the community than garden seeds. When you want carrot seeds, you have to sacrifice those roots for the sake of future carrots. The same goes for beans; any pods harvested for seeds will be sacrificed and won’t go into our dinner. Of course, it is impossible to generalize, but for most native plants, we can create seed gardens right in our landscapes. With the right techniques of ethical harvesting, community distribution and assisted growth, any garden bed can provide us with a phenomenal quantity of seeds over a number of years. So why aren’t we practicing the concept of seed libraries in communities across Canada?
Where there was once forest or prairies, the advance of turf over the landscape – a plant community composed of very few, mostly non-native species – is not completely irreversible. Over the years, we can create impressive plant biodiversity, albeit on a smaller surface area. Thanks to the work of a host of disciplines, including horticulturists (such as Rick Darke), landscape architects (Thomas Rainer), entomologists (Doug Tallamy and his team in Pennsylvania, Heather Holm in Minnesota, and Gail Langellotto in Oregon), the United States is spearheading an entire movement that is beginning to spread to Canada. We’re thinking of the Blooming Boulevards phenomenon, the David Suzuki Foundation’s Butterflyway Project, and more recently Ottawa’s Wildflower Seed Library.
But more than anything else, the focus must be on indigenous peoples and their vision of the world.
Turtle Island, as our continent is called in many cultures, is the ancestral and current home of a vast mosaic of aboriginal peoples. As a result of colonization, the oppression of their culture and the breaking of ancestral treaties that didn’t mention land cession, many of them have largely lost their knowledge of plants, their use and their role in nature.
Members of these peoples, such as botanist and storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer, have published works such as Braiding Sweetgrass, which speaks of native plants as a fundamental pillar of a way of seeing the world. This perspective has three “braids”: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and plant teachings.
We must sow now all that belongs to this earth, not just what appeals to us humans, if we are to have any chance of saving insects, our way of life and even the foundations of our human culture. That’s when you wonder what to do, when it all seems too late. But the opportunity to make a big impact is right there in your own backyard.
These species are far from undesirable. In fact, they’re superb in their place, diverse and colorful, evoking the environment in which you live. In soil of any type, clay, sand or even loam, lies the potential for an infinite stock of seeds. All we have to do is choose the right species, adapted to our region and soil, do a bit of work in the beginning, then wait a few years for the plants to bloom and the pollinators to find our oasis.
You’ll then be rewarded with a seed garden, which can be as beautiful as you like. Whether formal or a little messy (as some people call a healthy ecosystem), it will be able to offer us seeds, those portable plants that are key to the process of restoring our ecosystem. In many cases, these are the best way to share our nature.
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