Seeds. It Starts With Seeds
How seeds, literal and metaphorical, will replant and re-connect California and beyond
Personally and politically it’s been an overwhelming week. Southern California has also been on FIRE for multiple weeks. (Over 63 square miles at the time of this writing!) While not my current catastrophe, I lived in the vicinity intermittently for seventeen years, so it is my home terroir. Really though the catastrophe is also all of ours.
In the midst of all these things that make one want to weep, I am quite sincere when I say that possibly the most hopeful story I saw this week was about seeds.
California has long been astounding in the range of botanical species it can support. Growing up as a child I remember playing amongst banana, fig, nectarine, and almond trees in my grandmother’s back yard. It is a place where oranges hang over fences and where it is also possible to grow an avocado tree. And while these plants may help decrease our reliance on foreign imports, such exotics and their often high water needs are not going to be the primary best tools for revegetation. The whole area has been built for over a century on the illusion of abundant water and the rerouting of water resources from other regions and states. However, in a region that has now gotten zero inches of rainfall in eight months, we must continually reassess what the land can actually support now. There are also notably many wiser ways that water could be reclaimed and re-invested, which will continue to affect what is possible.
Amidst such a dry and treacherous climate, local Nina Raj is highly invested in humble but noble work. Even now she dreams of possibilities. Founder of the Altadena Seed Library, she has clearly created a deeply rooted community and a stunning website focused around native seeds and their free distribution.
As the site says, “through the distribution of free seeds we are working to expand equitable access to shade and green spaces, increase food sovereignty, connect neighbors, and restore local ecosystems.” Broadly that covers investing and creating a lot of social capital— the aspects of investments with highest return.
(*Food sovereignty, if you are unfamiliar, is the right for a people to have access to and control over their own foods).
“Seed Equity—”as Ms. Raj envisions it, should perhaps be reimagined as the most powerful currency and perhaps we should instead be measuring our wealth and equity as such much more of the time.
Identifying truly native plants, specific to individualized zip codes, are often foreign to many of us. Our cultural unawareness is a big reason why we need a return to localized botanical education in schools. To find plants and varieties native to a particular zip code try sites like The National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder Site or Cal Scape.
Thinking what to plant or what to send, remember in such a large scale devastation, where human pressures on the landscapes have already been extreme, multiple creatures including butterflies, bats, and native bees may be struggling to find their own unique food. Learning new native plants should expand our palates of what we see as edible as well.
Did you know for example that most yuccas are edible, their bushy clustery flowers resembling artichokes? These white flowers are also pollinated by species specific yucca moths. Or that all parts of various prickly pear cactus can be eaten. Woodland strawberries (Fragaria vesta) also called (Fragaria californica) with their petite berries can be a quick ground cover in more shaded or protected sections. Such plants will be essential for restoring this landscape, stabilizing the soils, and— if we are lucky, and bold enough in the scopes of our reimagining and re-plantings—restoring some of the missing hydrologic balance.
Watching Ms. Raj standing and interviewing between charred houses her hope seems incorrigible. She is astonishingly grounded, even in this affliction. With a slow steadying breath she pleas for others to send their surplus seeds for regional vegetation. She knows how beautiful it has been, and how beautiful it could be again. When asked how long it will take to restore the land, she replies, “Decades.”
This is time we cannot afford to lose.
It is time we have already spent.