I always had a garden. Even when I was a young child; when I was at university, while I was flatting, travelling and living overseas.
But I do not always remember seeds.
It was not until I got on the Kaiwaka Garden Club bus and travelled to the National Fieldays in 1986, a few weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, that seeds became important to me.
While at Fieldays, I spent some time in the “seed tent”. The man running it told me that the only seeds we could buy in New Zealand, that were grown here, were Pukekohe Long Keeper onions.
I found out later that his comment was not entirely accurate. There were other homegrown seed available here, but most of them came from overseas – from European countries. The knowledge served to galvanise me. We had friends in Holland who, at that time, had nuclear radiation drifting over their land, contaminating their soil. Here we were in Aotearoa, with literally no idea that our food security was dependent on seeds being grown in the northern hemisphere, at a time when nuclear war felt imminent. All at once, I realised, we had stopped gardening and lost connection with our seeds.
I had four young children at the time and I remember standing there knowing I had to do something. I just had no idea what. Despite being an avid gardener, I had never heard of seed saving. Seeds, I thought, came in packets from the supermarket.
I had already been collecting heritage fruit trees for a few years and I was aware that it was the older gardeners who tended to grow heritage crops. With them, I’d find the treasure. So I sought them out.
Not long after Fieldays, I attended my first session of the Kaiwaka Garden Club. Suddenly, I was surrounded by elderly gardeners, many of whom possessed rare and cherished family seed lines that they had nurtured and protected for generations. The children and grandchildren of these elderly gardeners had lost interest in gardening, and so these varieties were in danger of dying out. They needed a home, someone to take care of them, to continue their journeys. I was in the right place, at the right time.
The very first seeds that would one day form the Kōanga collection were gifted to me by a woman named Mary. They were Dalmatian beans. I had never heard of them before, but I think every woman at the garden club that day knew all about them. They were gumdigger seeds, so called because they’d come to New Zealand with Dalmatian migrants whose livelihoods involved digging for kauri gum. They had never been available commercially, but every woman in the club knew they were the best green beans. They are fat, tender and sweet with no strings, light green with purple streaks when the sun hits them.
I now know why they aren’t available commercially – they don’t have enough seeds in their pods to be economic. Growing and selling them is a labour of love.
The next seed to come was winter lettuce from my mother in law, Mary Corker. Once she found out I was interested in the old seeds, she passed me these ones. She’d always grown these lettuces for their ease – they self-seed freely and don’t get eaten by slugs and snails. Resilient and rigorous, they provide a steady harvest all winter. If you cut off the whole lettuce, it comes back again.
The more seeds I collected, the more I came to know their stories and benefits. I was given Urenika potatoes, known as Māori potatoes and reputedly possessing 1,000 times more antioxidants than supermarket potatoes. Then came Egyptian tree onions, Port Albert cucumbers and bohemian sugar peas – the best fresh-eating peas in the world, in my opinion. The Port Albert cucumbers came from our neighbours on the Kaipara Harbour, where we lived at the time. Migrants from Germany came to Port Albert, bringing their cucumber seed with them. They used to make Port Albert cucumber sandwiches and row over to Hargreaves Bay every year on New Year’s day for a holiday. All of these seeds are still favourites of mine today. I grow all of them in my home garden.
As I collected these varieties, I began to realise that the fruit and vegetables they bore tasted far better than shop produce. But they also had a far deeper effect on me – providing far more nourishment than other food.
It’s difficult to describe, but every time I bit into a heritage apple or tomato, the whole story or whakapapa of that food went through me on a cellular level, changing me in a subtle yet powerful way – opening up parts of me I didn’t know existed.
In the following years, the science began to emerge showing that not only are our heritage food plants far more nutrient-dense than supermarket produce, but through our DNA, our bodies recognise the food plants of our ancestors, and are more apt to absorb the nutrients that they provide.
In a gardening context, I noticed these seeds responded to organic production in a way I had not seen before. When you grow your seeds in living soil – soil high in humus and minerals and microbes; soil with a high vibration – a communication bridge forms between the fine, invisible feeder roots of the young seedlings and the life in the soil. I believe that using heritage seeds in healthy soil intensified this communication bridge, allowing the messages across time and space that resided in the soil to be transferred to those newly grown crops. When we eat these plants, those messages pass to us.
This is what I felt when I described being affected by the whakapapa of each food plant. The memories from all of the ancestors that had grown those seeds; the places they had been grown – all of it passed to me. I felt very connected, and I saw clearly my path forward.
Of all the heritage seeds and food plants in Kōanga’s collection, the seed I hold most sacred is the kānga ma corn. Traditional Māori corn, the seed came to our collection many years ago with a letter from a kaumātua begging me to save it. The seeds look like pearls and their vibration, or wairua, is very powerful. I grow kānga ma every year – it is our grain.
Some of our grains are very rare in their countries of origin, and many of them – including kānga ma – originated in Central America, thousands of years ago. Earlier this year, I was able to give my daughter Amber packets of this sacred seed to return to the Kogi in Colombia (see caption above) – something that was incredibly humbling and fufilling for me.
Much of the Western world began losing heritage seeds after the second world war – when industrial agriculture began cultivating monocrops, breeding hybrid seeds and controlling more of the food supply. Since then, 90% of our heritage varieties have been lost. Because so few people value these seeds, they are uneconomic to grow and sell and Kōanga makes an enormous loss protecting them and making them available. We do it because we have to. We know how important they are – these are the seeds of our ancestors.
If you have an opportunity to collect your own heritage seeds, please do. Ask your grandparents, neighbours, garden club members, and just look around back yards and orchards. You’ll be surprised by what’s growing in people’s gardens, and the remarkable stories that come with them.
The earth is in a time of great flux, and I believe it is our mission to create something new from the stories of the past.
This mission could begin for you with the seeds in your garden!