There is a shed at the edge of a market garden outside Hollin Bridge that holds, by Orla Fenn's best estimate, four hundred and twelve varieties of vegetable seed. It is not a large shed. It used to hold a lawnmower. Now its walls are lined with card-index cabinets bought from a library that was closing down, and every drawer is full of paper envelopes, labelled in pencil, that smell faintly of dust and pepper.
“People think a seed bank is a vault in a mountain,” Orla says, pulling open a drawer marked BEANS, CLIMBING, G–M. “Some of them are. Most of them are this.”
“Every time a catalogue drops a variety, it's gone. Not from the world, maybe. But from anywhere a normal person can get it.”
I came to Hollin Bridge because I wanted to understand an economy that barely shows up in any statistics. Seed is the first input of almost everything we eat, and most of it is now bought: bred by a few large companies, multiplied under contract, cleaned, coated, packed and sold to growers every year. But underneath that market there is an older one, informal, mostly unpaid, held together by envelopes and favours, in which people save seed from their own plants and give it away. It has never been large. It may now be growing.
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