I am growing barley now. I’m also growing millet, corn, tomatoes and squash. In the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that this is entirely accidental. Let me explain.
It began with a pair of king parrots, which we enticed to our deck with a few walnuts. To our delight, they were soon regular visitors. They were tidy eaters. Each parrot would carefully pick up a walnut fragment with its beak, transfer it to one claw, then hold it aloft as it munched away, as though idly snacking on hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. Word must have got out. More parrots arrived and waited every morning on the railing, the gutter and in tree branches. It was beautiful but a little Hitchcockian, and the steady supply of walnuts was getting expensive. So, we purchased birdseed for wild birds, and that’s when everything got out of hand.
The parrots didn’t really care too much for the birdseed. They far preferred the walnuts. In fact, they demanded them in shrill whistles at the kitchen window. Meanwhile, the local cockatoos loved the new offering. One arrived and then another, and soon there were upwards of nine enormous yellow-crested cockatoos claiming the deck as their own. They were jealous eaters, and there were arguments. There was a pecking order I couldn’t quite figure out, and from what I could tell, neither could the cockatoos. They also made an absolute mess of things. A cockatoo, when feeding, will swipe at its food with a swing of its thick neck as it spreads the seeds and picks out the best ones. And so, every morning, a small pile of birdseed was quickly sent flying in all directions in furious little arcs. Despite our efforts to clean up the mess, a rat began prowling the perimeter of the house at night, enticed by the remaining seeds. Before I could decide what to do about it, an enormous python arrived quietly one evening and the rat was never seen nor heard again.
One day not long after, I found something unusual growing in one of the planters, the one where I had recently planted a little lime bush. It wasn’t the lime bush that had me perplexed, though. It was the tall reedy stem growing next to it. It looked a lot like barley, and I distinctly recalled having never planted barley. Then I remembered the utter mess the cockatoos had made. Some of the seeds must have fallen in the planter where the soil was fresh and recently fertilised. It was also in a nice sunny spot and was regularly watered, all great conditions for germination. A quick investigation revealed that, yes, this brand of birdseed did indeed contain barley seeds.
Soon there was another stem of barley. Then, one morning, I realised something else had been growing in the planter, hidden behind the small branches of the lime bush. This was also a long stalk, but it curved elegantly at the top as it split into half-a-dozen finely branched stems, each covered in delicate green beads. At first it looked a bit like a rice plant. I showed my youngest, who arched a disbelieving eyebrow. She loves rice, but the rice she knows comes in packets full of pale, dry grains, and then it enters the rice cooker, water is added, buttons are pressed, and out comes a steaming white mass of food. I could see her working to reconcile these ideas until her expression relaxed into one of, ‘Sure, why not?’ I suppose at nine years old the whole world is still strange and new, and full of sure-why-nots. But as the plant continued to grow I realised it wasn’t rice at all. It looked a lot more like something called common millet. I checked the birdseed box again. Yes, that’s precisely what it was.
Soon I noticed that the seedling of a corn plant was emerging from that same planter. Meanwhile, there was a temporary midden of plant waste in the garden which was slowly being churned into compost, and whatever seeds were in there were germinating like crazy. There was more corn there, too, and tomatoes were coming up, as well as big flat leaves unmistakably heralding squash. It seemed that a whole world had arrived via seeds. Barley, Hordeum vulgare. Common millet (Panicum miliaceum). Corn, Zea mays. Tomato, Solanum lycopersicum. Squash, Cucurbita maxima. There were alleles in that barley that extended back thousands of years to the Fertile Crescent. The alleles in that single stem of millet could be traced directly to the earliest days of Neolithic China. Contained in those vibrant green early leaves of corn were genetic echoes from the Balsas Valley in Mexico. Similarly, the tomatoes and the squash each carried genes that originated in the valleys and hills of Mesoamerica.
This is what seeds will do if given half a chance: they will confound and surprise you. They are packed full of alleles, history and possible futures. Time travellers all, and oh, what tales they have to tell.
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I decide to try again with the sunflowers. I buy new seed packets and double-check the expiry date. It’s a few years from now, but in this moment, in the midst of a global pandemic, it seems several lifetimes away. I don’t know what that world will be like, but I hope there will be sunflowers.
We plant the seeds, my children and I. Surely something will grow this time – and sure enough, it does. Less than a week later, the first shoot emerges. It’s tiny and pale green, and it’s wearing the cracked-open seed coat like a little hat. Soon there are others. Lots of them. It seems that sunflowers will make me smile even before the first yellow bloom. Not every seed germinates, but that’s Okay. I now know it’s an evolutionary game of numbers and there’s an element of chance. Some seeds will not germinate, and of those that do, some won’t survive.
Speaking of which, I naively observe for a whole two days how suddenly there seem to be a lot of snails around. Then, in one evening, it seems like half my little seedlings have been eaten. I rescue the survivors, plucking snails away, and then, clutching the containers like a fearful mother, I carry them somewhere snail-proof. They grow into proud little seedlings and are taken to a new home in the garden bed.
This is what I now understand about sunflower seeds. Sunflowers are from the Asteracea family, and their seeds have relatively short life spans compared to the longer-lived seeds of species like barley, acacia and, given certain rare conditions, Judean date palms, lotuses and Canna indica lilies. Sunflower seeds are orthodox, but they are also ‘oilseeds’, and the oil they produce makes them a little difficult to store long term. They have weak, water-permeable seed coats, and while they exhibit physiological dormancy soon after harvest, it’s fleeting.
What’s more, I’m told they tend to dip into their food stores before germination. When Carol Baskin tells me about how a seed is like a baby in a box with its lunch, sunflower seeds are the first caveat. ‘Sometimes the baby plant eats all of the lunch,’ she says. This is fine if the conditions for germination are quick to arrive, but not so much if there’s a long wait. It seems there’s a certain genetic impatience about sunflowers, something that goes with all that exuberance, perhaps. If you find yourself in possession of sunflower seeds, plant them quickly.
With seeds, plants found a way to hack time, arriving at an ability to cast genes forwards into the future in a way that most other living organisms cannot. This deft evolutionary manoeuvre, this seed habit, changed our world, but it came neither quickly nor easily. It was, like all of evolution’s astonishments, the product of millions of years of molecular negotiation, as plants and indeed individual species found the contours of what physics would allow and what chemistry would condone, all within the ever-shifting boundaries of the environment. In the end, time is navigated a little differently by each and every seed.
And it is a navigation, not an evasion. Nothing escapes time entirely. Besides, what would be the point of casting one’s genes so far into the future that they might drift hopelessly in some vast, empty infinity? No, the entire point is to emerge. Maybe in the spring, maybe in 2000 years. But the idea, if one can go so far as to call it an idea, is that the species will continue. And what is that if not hope?