mostly words

My win­ter pile of plant and seed cat­a­logs con­tains one that doesn’t fit the usual model. Instead of page after page of gor­geous soft-core porno­graphic pho­tos and draw­ings of plants in brawny full leaf and buxom full bloom, the J.L. Hud­son Seeds­man cat­a­log takes the form of a tight 95 pages of black-on-white text and only twenty-five small line draw­ings for illustrations.

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This is a cat­a­log all about words. It could well change your expec­ta­tions of what a seed cat­a­log should be. It’s listed as an “eth­nob­otan­i­cal cat­a­log of seeds,” and you can sit down with it and read it like a novel. Most of the seeds descrip­tions come with a sen­tence or two of cul­tural trivia about the plant, mostly about how one of the world’s soci­eties uses that plant. I’ve been find­ing that this is the cat­a­log that I’ve been spend­ing the most time with this year.

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In addi­tion to the inter­est­ing cat­a­log copy, you start to notice that the text itself is gor­geous in the way it sits on the page. I was try­ing to place the spe­cial qual­ity it has when I finally noticed on the last page an inter­est­ing state­ment: “This pub­li­ca­tion was type­set entirely with­out the use of computers.”

No com­put­ers? In 2009? So retro it’s avant-garde, like albums released on vinyl. But worry not. They also have an online pres­ence.

This is def­i­nitely a cat­a­log with atti­tude. It’s also a cat­a­log with a pur­pose, a pur­pose that’s well doc­u­mented in a state­ment on their web­site, a pur­pose that’s in line with their self-description as a “pub­lic access seed bank.” You can also start to under­stand the pur­pose when you look at the titles of the brief selec­tion of books offered in the back of the catalog.

One of the works, Inva­sion Biol­ogy: Cri­tique of a Pseu­do­science, has a writeup that includes the state­ment, “We have all heard the breath­less tales of the dan­gers of ‘inva­sive alien species,’ but what does sci­ence say about them? …In all cases… intro­duced species have increased bio­log­i­cal diversity.”

Another title, Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence, gets a long writeup that includes the impas­sioned lines, “Most U.S. envi­ron­men­tal­ists are com­pletely opposed to the aims of fas­cism, but reac­tionary forces have begun to bend eco­log­i­cal themes towards these very ends. Only through knowl­edge may we pre­vent this per­ver­sion of environmentalism.”

Once you under­stand where the cat­a­log is com­ing from, you’ll start to under­stand the almost will­ful atti­tude that would drive them to offer seed of black mus­tard, one of the plants that has taken over much of the local ecosys­tem and has few friends among the plant peo­ple I know. And one of the recent online cat­a­log sup­ple­ments had seed for Arundo donax, a plant that has taken over some impor­tant local ripar­ian habi­tats. Why don’t you just dump plu­to­nium in your gar­den? Hmmmm…Does that make me an ecofascist?

You don’t have to agree with every­thing you see in the cat­a­log, and you don’t have to buy any­thing out of it. But this is one pub­li­ca­tion that’s a must read if you’d like to get your­self think­ing instead of all hot and both­ered over the usual pretty pictures!

January 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: • • • • • • | 7 Comments »