Portland Monthly Magazine June 2009 - Rebecca Clarren writes: "HERE, in a building guarded only by a standard burglar alarm and a handful of exterior security cameras, scientists at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, a unit within the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS), are even now hedging against humanity’s uncertain future. Within the twenty-eight-year-old facility’s greenhouses, sheds, and freezers, which sprawl through sixty acres of orchards and field plantings, are the fruits and nuts and seeds and pollen of roughly ten thousand plants collected from all over the world. It is the repository’s job not only to protect these precious bits of propagation as some sort of worst-case-scenario refuge, but in many cases, to perfect them through countless rounds of experimentation, making their edible blooms and pomes a leafy Steve Austin: better, stronger, faster.
The plants under the care of the repository’s four USDA scientists and their ten-person support staff are the equivalent of rare artifacts in a museum, each containing a particular story of origin. Except that in this case, the museum pieces are alive. Inside one of a dozen screened sheds are the strawberries that were depicted in early fifteenth-century paintings of the Virgin Mary. Outside, in the orchard—where long rows of trees and shrubs trade shades of red, yellow, and pea green—are several varieties of pears that may have been eaten by the caesars of ancient Rome. There is medlar, a hard-skinned fruit with a mushy middle that Shakespeare used as a metaphor for women: half rotten, half ripe. There are golden quinces from Iran, heavy with a sweet aroma; historians think they, not the legendary apple, were the true stars of the Garden of Eden. There is hardy kiwi, native to the mountains of northeastern China, scaling a trellis—the fruit tastes like its fuzzy cousin but has a shiny, smooth surface." Read more online at Portland Monthly Magazine, the June 2009 Issue.
Rebecca Clarren is a 2009 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow who frequently writes about agriculture and the environment.
What you can do? Join the Home Orchard Society, Visit the Seed Savers Exchange, and read Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Susanne Ashworth and Kent Whealy to learn how to save your own seeds.
