The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Seeds

There are some children in my life for whom buying Christmas gifts is a challenge. Most of them have everything they need or want. What could I give them that would be meaningful, fun and easy on my wallet? What could amuse them for more than an hour's time and not squeak, break or drive their parents mad?

Browsing in GRDN the other day, a pretty little garden store in Brooklyn, New York, I found a stack of beautifully packaged Hudson Valley Seed Library seeds. Unable to resist their artist-designed packets, I boughtpotted trout lettuce as well as borage, some dragon beans, ruby beets, arugula, New Yorker tomatoes and broccoli. Each package fits perfectly inside an envelope along with a Christmas card. They also make perfect stocking stuffers.

Coincidentally, my friend Dan phoned me to say he had some seed for me. Two dried seedheads from the single, tall black hollyhock (bottom right) that I had admired on Fire Island this summer. Now I have dozens in the making.


And that's how the idea of gifts of seed for children was planted. Affordable, pretty, long-lasting, often edible...

Gardening was a staple of my childhood. My gardening career began at the age of four when my mother gave me radish seeds to plant. Soon I had my own garden patch with not only red radishes but sweet peas, larkspurs and indigenous South African ixias. The bug had bit: I was in love with gardening. I liked getting my hands full of wet soil. I loved poking a hole in the ground to drop a seed in, patting it closed, watering it, waiting, picking it, smelling it and finally, in the case of the radishes, eating it.

There is a distinct satisfaction about gardening from seed. Professionally, I am surrounded by an instant-gratification kind of garden culture -- one that has almost caused me to forget about seeds. I have witnessed it all: Eight-foot-tall pleached beech hedges shipped from Europe to be planted on New York City rooftops, mature apple trees craned up to terraces and perennials bought and planted at their peak of bloom so as to escape the tedium of having to wait for flowers. The simplicity of seeds had almost slipped my mind.
My mother grew almost everything from seed. She sowed all her annuals (spring, summer, autumn) and perennials in black plastic seed trays, thinning them out, transplanting them into the garden. I saw everything from start to finish and did the same in my own little bed behind the house.

Looking at these seeds in the store, I was reminded of my own little terrace garden and got to thinking of what will be popping up in the spring. In the middle of winter and seedlings are on my mind. What is more hopeful?


Children need to garden: It's good for them. Waiting for a plant to grow is an exercise in patience. Successfully growing a plant is the result of healthy nurturing. Gardening is the best and most accessible therapy I can think of. For parents! To water a seed bed and then pick the flowers that you've grown puts the strains of every day life into perspective -- stopping to smell the roses, literally. The heart rate slows and we breathe again.

Even if it's just in a pot on a tiny terrace, like my spring arugula and mizuna, the smallest garden can restore us to what what feels good in life. The urban density of New York where even a fire escape holds a tomato or some herbs is a lesson in appreciating the luxury of an entire backyard, so often unused and empty in this country.


Having an outdoor space without a garden in it, modest or ambitious, is a waste. It is an opportunity squandered -- particularly for children. Gardens teach them about themselves, about what they can do and about how good it feels to look after and care for something. And then they have that other quality: they are beautiful.

Sowing new seed offers us something to look forward to. Something worth waiting for.

This year, give them seeds.