By: Molly Marquand
It was somewhere around lunch time, I know, because I’d grown careless. Was it Viola pedata or Viola palmata with the more finely divided lobes? I sat on a mound of moss and decided it could wait, unearthing my squashed sandwich from beneath the heft of Michael Dirr’s woody plant manual. First, came the scratching sound, then something distinctly guttural, like a throat clearing, or a grunt, and lastly– a soft plop.
Three soft plops, to be precise.
Turning around on my damp pillow of moss I regarded three black bear cubs sliding down three separate trees, making a beeline for me and my sandwich. Not 100 feet off in the distance, covering ground quickly, was mother. I’d bungled into a game of hide and seek.
I didn’t check how fast she was running. I didn’t check if she was gunning for me, or just to catch up with her cubs. I didn’t actually stop to check or consider anything. I just ran. As fast as I could. And I didn’t stop until I reached the very top of the mountain- a bald knob a half a mile distant.
It was sitting there on the scree of that south facing summit I remembered it was pedata with the more finely divided lobes. There was a literal carpet of the little frilly violets down there, seed capsules full, awaiting collection, amongst the frolicking bear cubs. But you couldn’t pay me a small fortune to go back. Funny how a shot of adrenalin can clear the mind enough to let small details reemerge.
Taking a bite of my sandwich, which impressively had made it up the mountain with me, I stopped mid-chew to listen to a hissing sound. Not quite like hissing, actually, more like someone slowly releasing air from a balloon. I scanned my surroundings and discovered there, camouflaged in the rocks, not three feet distant, was a hog nosed snake. He was erect, neck flattened, looking for all the world like something very venomous and certainly very dangerous. Luckily for me my snake identification was closer to mind than my plant taxonomy, and I sat, impressed, and watched until the display was done and he slithered off to find a new basking spot.
Not every seed collecting foray is full of such excitement, but the details never fail to thrill. In the 18 years I’ve spent collecting seed for various organizations and agencies I’ve seen a Coopers hawks snuff out a robin in a sudden poof of feathers, an ancient and truly enormous snapping turtle lay gobs of wet eggs in the gravel soil of a red oak forest, and a rattlesnake, as fat as my arm, shed its skin. These little moments are so easily missed when we’re on the go, constantly squeezed into ever more efficient patterns of living, but they happen all around us every day. We just have to be there, and bear witness.
The process of planning, making, and caring for a collection requires the same amount of attentiveness and patience as watching wildlife does. The first few months of the season are spent ‘scouting’ and finding populations large enough to support a collection: you never want to harvest from a small number of plants and deprive them of the opportunity to reproduce, grow, and feed the wildlife that depend on them. 50+ plants is the ideal number to sample from, but, in a pinch 25 will do. To make the right collection I have to return several times to the same population. Of course, if you’re sampling correctly, you’ll always do this to capture early, middle, and late maturing fruits and the genetic diversity resident within each crop. This serial visitation of the same population means I see all the minutiae taking place as plants change from bud to flower, to seed, and all the lives that depend so critically on this process.
The collection period is busy. Lots of checks ensure that you get at least some of the fruit before the beaked, furry, or antennae-d local residents do. Storage is straightforward and sensible- never leave your stash of seeds somewhere damp, or very hot (think, a car on a sunny September day), and once you’re home, seeds need to be air dried for a while before being stored somewhere relatively dry, dark, and on the cool side. Seed banks like the Mid Atlantic Regional Seed Bank in New York ‘dry down’ seed first, before packing it in appropriate containers (sometimes a breathable cloth sack, sometimes a paper envelope, sometimes a foil bag) in a chamber which is somewhat like a gigantic floral cooler: it’s chilly in there, but not freezing, and about 15% relative humidity. This keeps the seed asleep, but alive, for a decade or more, depending on the species.
We don’t often think of seeds as requiring such devoted stewardship, but the practice of seed collection and curation asks for a mindset of caretaking—each step requiring patience, and a pair of wide open eyes.
Once, on the beaches of Maryland collecting Spartina patens at the tail end of fall, I found an exhausted monarch in the marsh. I carried it in my sack back to the shore, cut an orange for it, and left it on the front seat of my car with the window down. After three hours of collecting pounds and pounds of this critical saltwater species, I returned to the butterfly who, upon being reintroduced to the southerly breeze, immediately took flight and continued her journey, hopefully rejuvenated.
Speaking of monarchs, I could never forget the year of the enormous migration which I watched from the southeastern shore of Staten Island as literally hundreds poured forth in a continual stream. Despite the silhouette of Manhattan in the distance, it was an experience of utter timelessness. For thousands of years these creatures have used these shores as a migratory landmark– through the advent of the wheel, the reign of Henry the VIII, the fall of the Berlin wall. I was in the right place, at the right time.
Collecting seed, and working with plants in general, is an exercise in looking, and listening. It requires a willingness to go slowly we don’t prize highly in this day of constant stimulation, and incessant busy-ness. As I wait now this fall for my target species to ripen I marvel at the intelligence, and wild determination, inherent in each seed. The sugar maples with their samara helicoptering down, the eager jewelweeds exploding their capsules, making kids laugh with surprise, the tenacious burrs and desmodiums– so wise and confident somehow, knowing they’ll eventually catch a ride in a tangled tuft of fur.
The world is full of these seeds of wonder to harvest, if only we can slow down a little, put ourselves patiently in the right place and just– look.
Molly Marquand is a botanist, mother, and native plant enthusiast located in New York’s Hudson Valley. Through her work with the Mid Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, Molly has collected seed for numerous federal, state, and private initiatives including the effort to save imperiled ash trees, several species of threatened viburnum, North American orchids, and a long list of species useful in restoration work. Currently, she is working to return an old pool pad in her garden to a xeric-loving native plant paradise.