Heritage Seeds

published in The Beaver by Canada's National Historical Society

Why should a home gardener consider growing a tomato with a hundred-year-old pedigree? The simple answer is because they can, and more importantly because someone must, in order to preserve our horticultural heritage. We have already lost a vast array of once-popular plant specimens due, in part, to the introduction of patented hybrid plants and simple changes in favour. Through the efforts of a few forward-thinking gardeners and farmers in the mid-eighties, innumerable varieties of distinctly Canadian garden plants have been saved from extinction.
Seeds of Diversity (SOD) is a nation-wide organization devoted to the preservation of heirloom plants. Bob Wildfong, SODs Executive Director, says, "We now have over 1,800 varieties that we are keeping alive, but I am perfectly comfortable saying there are over 4,000 varieties of heritage seeds being grown and saved in Canada."
Other than keeping our history alive, why should a home gardener be concerned with heirloom plants? Wildfong explains, "The variety of plants offered by commercial seed companies is based largely on how the global seed trade works." Most commercial seeds are grown on a large scale in Southeast Asia and South America, harvested mechanically and sold through a wholesale seed network. The varieties offered are not intended for the most optimum growth in Canadian growing conditions, and the home producer may not value the plant traits desirable for mass seed production. Why choose uniformity of size and ripening times over superior flavour and nutrient content, for example?
"There are no more garden tomato breeders left in Canada," laments Wildfong, "for budgetary reasons all of the government and university breeding programs have been shut down, and the last private program ended in 1995." Most new tomato strains introduced today will come from breeding programs in California and Texas.
Wildfong’s involvement with seeds of a heritage variety began in 1988, as a volunteer at a working recreation of an early 1900s village. Offered the responsibility of finding authentic plants that would have been grown in a home garden of that time, Wildfong admits he had, "no interest in gardening at all". As a new volunteer, he felt he couldn’t refuse, and the "historian in him" soon became fascinated with researching plants favoured by gardeners of the past and matching that information with what was available in modern seed catalogues.
Fortunately, Widfong was introduced to the Heritage Seed Program. When it was formed in 1984, not many people were familiar with the term ‘heritage seeds’, but a group of about 200 farmers and gardeners across Canada recognized that a significant number of plants were no longer being offered for sale in commercial seed catalogues. They knew intuitively the varieties had to be actively grown or they may disappear forever. A heritage plant by definition must be ‘open pollinated’; the seed will produce a plant identical to its parent, and retains its characteristics year-to-year. Generally, any specimen over fifty years old is considered ‘heritage’, but some have lineages that date back hundreds of years.
Knowing that home gardeners may still be growing a cross-section of these plants independently, the Heritage Seed Program created their own version of a seed catalogue and developed the concept of a seed exchange. Begun as a grassroots, collaborative endeavor, the program had no central inventory, and relied on the interchange between members themselves for the sharing of information and seed distribution.
From this simple start, Seeds of Diversity emerged as a non-profit organization with the purpose to ensure seeds are distributed to growers who will keep our heirloom plants alive. Only about one-quarter of SOD’s catalogued array of seeds is available commercially.
Each August, seed collectors inform SOD of the seed varieties—mostly vegetables, but some grains, flowers and herbs and a few special shrubs and trees—they have available and in January a catalogue is mailed to all members. Requests for seeds are made between members directly, for the cost of packaging and postage, from $2-$4 per selection.
Generations of growth and adaptation in our particular climate will create a plant far superior to any ‘new’ variety inaptly bred for our growing conditions, only one reason we must do what we can to conserve these living artifacts of our heritage.