The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (15 page)

The same with plant sex. Most of us are in the juvenile state of not knowing about the business of food creation.

No study of seeds can be complete without a quick review of carpology.

Vascular, seed-bearing plants within the kingdom Plantae are divided into two classes, angiosperms and gymnosperms. Angiosperms—dandelions, lilies, tomatoes, oranges, walnuts, peas—produce seeds enclosed in an ovary; gymnosperms—pines, cedars, cypress, spruces, cycads, gingkos—produce seeds on open scales, usually cones. I’m just going to talk about angiosperms here. Not that we don’t get food from gymnosperms, we do (pine nuts, for example, from stone pines). For the most part, however, our food comes from angiosperms.

Most angiosperms are flowering plants. Here’s their ditty:
First comes a flower, then pollination, and that’s how a plant does multiplication.
Practices procreation. Increases population. Knows consummation.

In less silly terms, plants construct flowers for a reason. They want to make more of themselves, to vegetate the world. After the flower is produced, it must be fertilized. A flower can be pollinated in three ways: a) with no outside effort, known as self-pollination, b) by wind, and c) by insect. Those in the last class must use bright colors and unusual fragrances to attract the pollinators they need.

Let’s look at a simple flower. Most flowers have a calyx, a set of leaflike sepals, and a corolla, which is the petals taken together. The female reproductive organs consist of an ovary, a vase where the eggs (or ovules) are fabricated; a stigma, a disk that receives pollen during fertilization; and a style, a slender stem or stalk to connect the two. Together the female organs are called the pistil. The male reproductive organs, or stamen, consist of an anther—which produces pollen—and a filament to hold the anther. In general, anthers cluster around the styles.

Here the botany of inflorescence gets more complicated. Some plants have
perfect
flowers, meaning they have both sex organs in one flower (such as peas and lettuce). Other plants have
imperfect
flowers, meaning only male or only female organs in one flower.

In plants with imperfect flowers, sometimes both male and female flowers occur separately on the same plant. These are called monoecious, which is Greek for “one household”—such as cucumber, corn, and figs. Dioecious, or “two households,” plants, on the other hand, have male flowers on one plant and female flowers on another—spinach, asparagus, and hemp.

Okay, cucumber is monoecious. One cuke plant has both female and male flowers. This is how you make a baby cucumber. After the woman cucumber marries the man cucumber, a bumblebee goes to visit each of them. He visits the man first. The man invites him to see his towers of gold, and while climbing there, some gold dust sticks to the bumblebee’s feet. The bee sits with the man and they get a nice buzz on, then the bumblebee says his goodbye. He needs to keep moving, to visit the woman, whom he finds by following the vine trail straight out the man’s door. The woman lives nearby. The bee tracks gold dust right through the woman’s doorway, and that causes a little cucumber at the bottom of her pretty yellow flower to start growing.

A Boothby Blonde cuke. Or a Diva. Or a Little Tyke. Or a Straight Eight.

Spinach is dioecious, some plants male and some female. This is how to make a baby spinach. The female spinach wants to have a house of her own. She enjoys her solitude and likes living by herself. The male spinach accepts that and has come to enjoy his own space too. But he loves the woman and he knows they need to make little ones of themselves, for they are only annuals and die after a year. When the woman is ready to make seeds, she telephones the man, and he opens up his flowers, which contain pollen as fine as baby powder. The wind picks up the pollen and carries it over to where the woman lives and flings it on her stigmas. This causes her ovules to begin turning into a little cluster of seeds.

Bloomsdale Long Standing seeds. Or Spartacus. Or Giant Nobel. Or Monnopa.

SOMETIMES I DREAM
a tree birthed me; I came tumbling like an apple out of its limbs. I came to a causeway and looked out across my father’s and mother’s faces, which were shining in the sun like the Gulf. I saw many beautiful things. I saw love in the eyes of deer. I saw the throats of lilies moving. And I wanted a farm. I wanted a farm at the border of wilderness.

I could not escape the terrible yearning.

Even as I was becoming a nature writer, seeking wildness and spending halcyon days walking through the remaining tracts of longleaf pine flatwoods, I battled a piece of myself that was happiest not in wilderness, but on a farm. I had come to think of a societal continuum that begins with wildness on one end (hunting and gathering for food), moving through agrarianism (settling down and tending a piece of land), then through industrialism (an urban life), into technologism (whatever that lifestyle is). A tract of land could sustain a forest or a farm or a manufacturing plant or a bank of computers operated by robots. If wildness was on the left of the continuum, I wanted all movement in terms of land use to be from right to left, always toward wildness. But though my hope for land is that it tends toward wild, the truth is that I am probably happiest somewhere in the middle. My friend Rick Bass once said to me, “What I would want, after working in the fields, would be to step away from the plow and enter an old forest, where I could walk, and rest at the end of a day of hard work.”

Once Silas left for college, every morning soon after I woke the longing accosted me. My mind turned to thoughts of what my life would be like, had I a place of my own. How—if I had land, trees, fields—different my decisions would be. I think perhaps the feeling derived from the idea of
cultus
and the instinct to care for something. I needed something to cultivate after Silas left. Every morning my thoughts arrived ultimately at the same question: Where is this place?

My husband and I actively searched for it. We wrote friends and strangers alike.

We are looking for a homestead. We are searching for an old Cracker house on a piece of land preferably in southern Georgia, in the coastal plain. A fixer-upper is good. Over fifty years old and historical is great. We are not looking for a modern-style ranch house or a brick house. We are not looking for highway frontage, but prefer to be on a dirt road. We’d love to have field, forest, a barn, or outbuildings (rundown is okay)—maybe wetlands or a creek or a pond. The more land the better, taking into account that we’re not millionaires. We need pasture. The upper limit of our comfort range is about $220,000. If you know or hear of any such place that comes close to this description, please let us know. We’ll investigate all possibilities. Thank you so much. Please pass this message along. And best of luck to you in finding the things you’re seeking!

We searched over a year for the right place, hours each week scouring the papers and online Realtor listings, more hours on the phone, more traipsing with Realtors around places that would never work. We put notes in mailboxes outside houses we fancied. You never know when and where you’ll find what you desire. But you get tired and you get discouraged. Every morning I knew I had to keep looking, with renewed vigor.

Meanwhile, we had been collecting farm animals and seeds and herbs and skills. All that was striking root. I needed a place to practice.

Part of the urgency Raven and I felt about finding a place was the growing body of evidence substantiating collapse, especially of the climate—and not simply the knowledge but the experience of it. During the two years of our search, the South emerged from a severe, three-year drought. Tornadoes in March were ransacking towns, tearing down schools and neighborhoods, killing people. More and more, the statistics pointed to the need to be settled in a community and able to provide at least some of one’s own basic needs. The national (and then international) housing catastrophe, as well as the stock market crash in the fall of 2008, naturally increased our panic.

During the second September of that long search, I had a gut-wrenching dream. A storm was coming. I had been at a gathering of people, many of them friends, and worry had descended on us. It was palpable. I was leaving with Silas when suddenly he and I were standing on the edge of outer space, on the perimeter of the very atmosphere. All around us the biosphere was blue, all shades of blue, swirling, something you might see if you were doing psychedelic mushrooms. I knew the blue meant ice. The blue hues were eddying, dragged around by speeding global winds. We could feel the cold wind all around us, it was a monolithic wind. I felt amazed and also helpless, and I remember thinking that at least Silas and I were together. Where the colors were powder blue I knew the ice had been melting.

That was the catastrophe. But now the ice was beginning to solidify again, and the whirling winds were turning all colors, rainbow colors, bright and vivid. We made offerings, Silas and I, of what we had, which was strips of potatoes. Then a man appeared. I didn’t know him and neither did Silas, but the man was holding a baby. That would become the important fact.

That’s all of the dream I remember, and maybe that’s all there was. I’ve never studied dream interpretation, but a couple of friends have, and I know that it was both a dream of warning and one of hope, a millennia encapsulated, a collapse and a rebuilding. There was hope in the colors and in the baby.

One day, jogging my daily two miles, I knew in my bones that the place for which we searched was available finally, that we simply had to find it. Such a premonition does little good when you have been looking already for so long, when you have a vast area in which to search (Raven and I had expanded our search into the Carolinas, Virginia, and north Florida, although we were still focused on south Georgia and the most rural parts of it). The last thing we wanted as the news worsened was to blast carbon dioxide into the air while riding on dirt roads, looking for a home. We were, at the time, living on family land and could have remained, but there we owned nothing. We were required to ask permission of my family in order to make changes that would simplify our existence, allowing us to be healthier and safer and more self-reliant, but many of our requests were denied. Our vision was not the vision of my family. My father, a junkman, continued to haul in load after load of material detritus and immaterial valuables.

Our farm came on the market when its owner, a developer, was unable to liquidate properties elsewhere. The FDIC forced the owner’s banks (he had a first and a second mortgage) to put pressure on him to sell. He wasn’t eager to part with the place.

One day I saw a picture of the house online. I remember the afternoon well. Raven was particularly dejected about our search that day, stymied as he was in his ability to move forward with his vision. I was on a writing deadline and needed to pack for a speaking engagement, but I’d sneaked a look at a Realtor site.

“Why don’t you ride over and look at this place?” I asked Raven. “Just to make sure. I know it’s not where we want to be, but it looks interesting.”

He was back in a hurry. “Drop everything,” he said. “We’ve found our farm.”

The house was two stories and painted white with forest green trim. Its metal roof was forest green. It was built in 1850 by Lawrence Pearson using native longleaf pine in the Federal style, although during renovations the front porch had been wrapped around in the style of Victorians. The wood for the house’s construction had come from surrounding flatwoods and had been milled less than a mile away, at a mill operated by Pearson’s brother.

The house sat on 46 acres. To the north and south were large pastures. To the east stood a mature pecan orchard where wild onions scented the fall air, and beyond that ran a dirt road. To the west mature deciduous forest descended slowly to a cypress-lined, blackwater, lilting stream named Slaughter Creek (because of a battle between Native Americans and white settlers). From any window of the house, only nature was visible—no neighbors, no streets, no electric lines, no gutters.

The farm was located in the delta of two rivers, each of them a couple miles away. To the east, the pristine Ohoopee carved its way through white sand, joining the fat Altamaha south of the farm, which drifted lazily toward Darien on the coast, some eighty miles away. The yard of the house was planted with redbuds, cedar, holly, and crepe myrtle trees. Best of all, in front of the house grew an ancient swamp chestnut oak—a landmark, tall and awesome—which covers an eighth of an acre by itself and which was dropping incredibly large acorns, its seeds everywhere.

In the fall of 2009, I would remember all the months of waiting; all those harangued months filled with longing for a place of my own, the place I dreamed of, where we could live the life we desired, where we could build things that would stay, where we could stay, even where we could be buried; and all those months of evenings when I searched newspapers and magazines and websites for the one ad that would call out to us, a home that we could afford. I remembered all that one morning teaching a nature-writing class as a visiting writer at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, while wind made the yellow trees sound like rain and somewhere a tractor puttered, while back home in southern Georgia my husband was in a lawyer’s office, signing for both of us, and although I wouldn’t be able to move in until I returned home a few days later, I would soon have the farm I dreamed of.