I feel a bit guilty when I find the old packet. I recall having the best of intentions when I bought it, but inexplicably, here it is, on the bedroom dresser.
I freely admit things tend to pile up right here. Elsewhere in the house, tidiness and chaos wax and wane in fairly regular cycles, but on this modest rectangle of timber, I mostly let entropy have its way. There are layers of good intentions: photographs meant be framed; drawings to be carefully stored; books to be read; receipts, notes and scripts to be filed; a few small recyclables to be reused; an indoor-skydiving gift voucher to be exchanged for something less terrifying. In some ways it’s oddly optimistic, this mundane detritus. It’s as if, contrary to all the evidence, I truly expect to get around to such things. Or perhaps it’s that nothing in my house is truly lost until I’ve searched here.
Today, while looking for something else entirely, I find that small packet of seeds. Friendly yellow script announces the contents as sunflower seeds, and there is a cartoon image of a little girl gazing at a giant sunflower, its petals expanding beyond her entire person. The girl’s expression is an astonished joy worthy of a unicorn sighting. Behind her is a bucolic scene of blue skies and green fields. It’s a simpler world, a better world. The suggestion, though not legally binding, is that perhaps I, too, can grow child-sized sunflowers on towering stems.
I still want a garden full of sunflowers for my daughters – tall, happy flowers surrounding the house. The rest of the world might go awry, but we can have some of that bucolic joy here. The flowers will bloom and their sun-like heads will follow the arc of our star throughout the day. I will point this out to my girls and talk about why sunflowers do this. We might talk, too, about Earth’s rotation, and why the seasons are what they are. We will read books out there and the children will momentarily forget that iPads exist. The dog, miraculously no longer inclined to dig up the yard, will laze in the dappled shade. Yes, it will be lovely, this garden. Sunflowers are not considered the most beautiful of all flowers, but there is an exuberance about them, something quite unapologetically grand and cheerful, that always makes me smile.
I have set out to plant the seeds in this packet a few times, but this has never eventuated and the packet has ended up on the Dresser of Entropy. It is now creased in places and browning slightly on one edge. I pick it up with a soft sigh, tilt it one way and then the other, listening to the seeds rattle about inside the stiff paper – it is the faint, dry sound of forgotten plans. I realise I don’t remember exactly when I bought these seeds. I simply can’t recall how far back this particular good intention goes.
I turn over the packet. There’s a stamp in the lower corner that says, ‘Sow by: August 2018.’ Oh dear. When I bought these seeds, August 2018 was an idle hand-wave at the distant future, but now it is a few years in the past. I frown at the stamped date. If I had simply planted these seeds when I’d bought them, we would have that lovely garden. But I wonder if it’s not too late: the kids are still kids, and anyway, you’re never too old for sunflowers.
I could purchase new seeds, but I suspect that throwing these ones in the bin and promising myself I will go to the nursery is a pathway to further procrastination, and I’m not willing to concede defeat this time. There’s potting soil somewhere in the garage, so I can start right away. I also realise that I have no idea exactly what the stamped date means. Does ‘Sow by’ mean ‘Best before this date and probably okay after that, but no promises’? Or does it point to some cold, hard moment of expiry? I can feel the rising swell of questions.
Seeds are meant to be durable, so they are meant to endure, aren’t they? Isn’t that the whole point of seeds? I’ve seen images of expansive deserts suddenly in bloom after a decade’s long drought is broken by abrupt, merciful rain. My memory shows me a scene in time-lapse, recalled from some documentary perhaps, of rainwater soaking into a cracked and barren landscape, of clouds whirring past, days and nights coming and going, until, in scant seconds, green shoots emerge from the ground, trembling with the film’s high speed until at last they bloom. Another memory bubbles to the surface: I’m sure I’ve heard of seeds that have sprouted after centuries, maybe even longer. As my brain offers up these half-memories, an unshakeable curiosity takes hold. How long do seeds really last? I decide I want to find out, and I’m going to start with this packet of old seeds. I want to know if they are still alive, if they still hold the promise of sunflowers.
Soon, everything is ready. It’s a bright morning, the sky clear after a day of big storms. A breeze moves through the tall trees, making light and shadow dance on the little outdoor table where I’m sitting. The morning sun is high and warm on the back of my neck. There are bird calls, mostly small and chirpy, but every now and then the air is punctured by the sharp cry of a cockatoo; I look up in time to catch a glimpse of large white wings as they glide over the trees. My youngest daughter is with me. We wipe the table clean and begin.
I tear off the end of the seed packet and tip it. Seeds spill onto the table with a soft clattering sound, a few of them spinning to a stop. They are dark grey with subtle silvery striations; their coats are smooth and seem to shine in the sunlight. They are oblong, although pointed at one end, like raindrops in mid-air. I show the seeds to my daughter, but she is more interested in her purple yo-yo, which she is swinging like a pendulum in an old clock. Still, she helps me count the seeds into groups of ten – there are more than seventy. At first they seem perfectly fine, but then I see it. Maybe this seed catches my eye because it is moving in the gentle breeze. It is lighter, more shiftable than the others, and I instantly see that though it was once a seed, it is now a fractured thing, broken open – an empty husk. Then I see another, and another. These seeds are not in great shape.
My daughter picks up one of the ruined seeds and cups it in the palm of her little hand. She is probably older than this seed, but it seems so much older than her. I look around and see a world of relative life spans. The dog is curled into a golden croissant of fur in his favourite sun-drenched spot. He is not yet seven but ageing faster than either of us humans; the seeds have apparently aged faster still. That cockatoo gliding past might live forty years in the wild, but it might reach 100 or more in captivity. The big tree in the backyard might last 150 years if things go well, but the native stingless bees drawn to its flowers will live just six months or so. The fruit flies that hover over our fruit bowl will get fifteen days if they’re lucky. I once saw a bonsai tree that, at 250 years old, had lived through both world wars, the Napoleonic Empire and the better part of Mozart’s career. Ageing, it seems, is a product of whatever bargain with physics a given organism is able to make.
We start to plant the seeds, each going into tiny egg-cup-sized paper pots filled with soil. I even plant the ones that seem beyond hope. I don’t know why, I know nothing will come of it, so I tell myself I’m just being thorough: plant everything, see what grows. But as I push them gently into the soil, it feels more like a burial. When we are finished, we water the soil and place the pots in a warm, sunny spot. Then we wait.
Days pass, then more days. I hadn’t expected anything to germinate right away, but I had hoped to see something, even just one defiant shoot emerging, determined to become not just a sunflower but also an emotive metaphor, life persisting against the odds and all that. But nothing of the sort happens. In fact, nothing happens at all. When several weeks have passed, it is very clear that, despite my penitent efforts, every last one of these seeds is utterly, hopelessly dead. Even though I have never had much of a green thumb, this is entirely new territory for me. My curiosity only increases. I commence another type of digging, searching for stories of extreme longevity in seeds, and I learn about seeds that, after centuries, even millennia, have still sprouted.
Now I want to know why some seeds stand the test of time while others cannot stand the test of being misplaced in my house for a few years. Why do some seeds endure and others don’t? And this raises other, more worrying questions. Where do our food crops fall on this spectrum? What about the world’s plant biodiversity? What of the flora intricately woven, both figuratively and literally, into the many and varied forms of human culture? What happens if we lose those seeds?
This is what I discover: seeds are time travellers, and as you would expect of any good time traveller, they have the most amazing stories to tell. Pick a seed, any seed, and it will take you on a wild ride. This is precisely how, one morning, I found myself drawn away from thoughts of a peaceful sunflower garden and plunged into the wrong side of Roman siege warfare. The world of seeds turns out to be so much more baffling and astonishing – and occasionally far more dangerous – than I ever would have imagined.