The Seed Library

Part One · Sixty Drawers

The card cabinet had stood in the basement of the Linden Ford library for twenty years, ever since the catalogue went onto computers, and on the last Saturday in February two men in overalls carried it up the stairs to be discarded. Ama was sitting in the window seat with a book about volcanoes when they set it down by the door to rest. It was made of dark honey-colored wood, and it had sixty small drawers, each one with a brass handle and a brass frame for a label, and every drawer slid out with a soft wooden sigh. Ama put down the volcanoes. She opened a drawer, then another, and by the time the men came back she had a plan.

Her plan came mostly from her grandfather, though he had not been consulted. Grandad Kofi grew vegetables on an allotment behind the railway line, and every autumn he saved seeds from his best plants in paper envelopes, labeled in pencil, and kept them in a biscuit tin under his bed. He had runner beans that had come from his own father and tomatoes that had come from a neighbor in nineteen eighty-one. He never bought a packet if he could help it. The only thing he would not save was squash. Ama had asked him why, more than once, and he always gave the same answer, which was that squash could not be trusted and that one day she would see.

The librarian, Ms. Adeyemi, listened to the whole plan without interrupting. A seed library, Ama explained, worked exactly like a book library, except that you borrowed seeds in spring, grew them all summer, and gathered the crop. In autumn you brought back seeds saved from your own harvest, so that the drawers filled themselves up again and nobody ever had to buy anything. Ms. Adeyemi said that the cabinet could stay, by the window, if Ama would look after it. Grandad Kofi donated half his biscuit tin. Ama wrote labels for forty drawers in her most meticulous handwriting, beans and tomatoes, peas and lettuce, pumpkin and marigolds, and by the end of April almost every drawer was empty, which seemed at the time like a triumph. Nobody, Ama included, had thought very hard yet about the part where the seeds came back.

Part Two · Overdue

Ninety-three borrowers took seeds that spring. Ama knew the number exactly, because they signed for them in a notebook on top of the cabinet. She recited the names to her grandfather on the bus home every Saturday as if they were football results. All summer she envisioned the autumn, when ninety-three envelopes would come back through the library doors, plump with seed, and the drawers would be heavier than they had ever been. The deadline for returns was the last day of October. By the end of that day, four borrowers had returned seeds. One of them was her grandfather, and another was Ms. Adeyemi, and Ama could not help noticing that both of them were people who knew her personally.

She decided that the problem was discipline. The library sent out notices for overdue books, so Ama made overdue notices for seeds, on orange card, with a border of small stern exclamation marks, and Ms. Adeyemi helped her post one to every name in the notebook. The notice said that the seed library depended on returns, that the shelves could not refill themselves, and that borrowers were kindly reminded of their responsibility. It worked, in a sense. Over the next fortnight two more people came in, both looking sheepish, and each of them pushed a brand-new packet of shop seeds into the cabinet without meeting her eyes. After that, Ama noticed, several regular visitors began detouring around the catalogue cabinet to reach the returns desk.

Ama sat in the window seat that evening and felt like the worst kind of librarian, the kind who makes people creep. The cabinet stood beside her with its sixty brass handles, and nearly every drawer behind them was empty. Ms. Adeyemi came over with two cups of hot chocolate from the staff room, which she said was strictly for emergencies, and asked whether Ama had considered simply asking people why they had not returned anything. Ama said that she knew why. They were forgetful, or they were indifferent. Ms. Adeyemi said that was possible, and that it was also possible something else was going on, and that the only way to find out was to ask somebody who had not returned anything.

So the next Saturday Ama stood beside the cabinet with the notebook, and every time a name from it walked through the door she went over, introduced herself, and asked, as politely as she could, what had happened to the seeds. Nobody had forgotten, it turned out, and everybody cared. A man who drove the school bus said that he had grown magnificent tomatoes and eaten every single one, because how did you get seeds out of a tomato. A woman with twins said that her beans had been delicious, and that she had assumed seed saving was for experts. Nearly every borrower had cultivated something. Hardly anybody knew that the seeds for next year had been sitting inside it all along.

Part Three · Results Not Guaranteed

Ama went home and asked her grandfather whether he would teach a class. He said he had never taught anything in his life, and then he spent the whole of the next week rehearsing. On the first Saturday in November twenty-six people sat on folding chairs in the children's corner while Grandad Kofi stood at the front with a tomato in one hand and a dried bean pod in the other. He showed them how to scoop the seeds out of a ripe tomato into a jar of water. Then you left the jar on a windowsill for three days, until it fermented and a skin of mold grew on top, which loosened the jelly around each seed. After that you rinsed them, he said, and dried them on a saucer.

Beans were easier. You left a few pods on the plant until they went brown and papery and rattled when you shook them, and the seeds inside were ready. Somebody asked whether every plant was as straightforward, and Grandad Kofi said no, and looked at Ama, and finally explained about squash. Beans and tomatoes, he said, mostly pollinate themselves inside their own flowers, so their seeds grow into plants just like the parent. But a squash plant has separate flowers that depend on bees, and a bee will carry pollen from a pumpkin to a courgette in the next garden without consulting anybody. The fruit looks perfectly normal that year. It is the seeds inside it that have been mixed.

The returns began the following week, and they did not stop. Tomato seeds came back dried on squares of kitchen paper, and beans in jam jars, and marigold seeds in an envelope decorated by a four-year-old. By Christmas thirty-one drawers were full again. Then, in January, the school bus driver arrived with an enormous paper bag of pale flat seeds from the colossal pumpkin he had cultivated in his front garden, right next to his neighbor's courgettes. He was immensely proud of it. Ama looked at the bag, and thought about her grandfather, and thought about bees. She could not bring herself to discard the seeds, so she gave them a drawer of their own at the very bottom of the cabinet.

She labeled it in capital letters. The label said SQUASH, RESULTS NOT GUARANTEED, and underneath, in smaller writing, that whatever grew from these seeds should be brought back to the library in September, so that everybody could see. That drawer emptied faster than any drawer in the cabinet, and it emptied again when the bus driver brought more. By the next September, a long table by the window held the most peculiar vegetables Linden Ford had ever produced. There was a courgette with the orange skin of a pumpkin, and a pumpkin with green stripes, and a pale yellow thing shaped exactly like a pear, which the twins had named Gerald. Ms. Adeyemi made a card for each of them and labeled them like exhibits.

Everybody who brought a squash to the table brought something else as well, an envelope of beans or a twist of lettuce seed, because they were in the building anyway and the cabinet was right there. The notebook showed one hundred and forty borrowers that second year, and one hundred and two returns. Ama read the numbers to her grandfather on the bus home, and he nodded solemnly, as though she were telling him about a long football match that had ended well. On the table there was one entry Ama had not expected. It was a round green squash with knobbly orange warts all over it, and its card said, in neat pencil, that it had been grown by Kofi Mensah, who had been warned.

He had taken a seed from the bottom drawer in March, he admitted, purely in the interests of science. Ama said that he had told her for years that squash could not be trusted. Her grandfather said that he had been entirely correct, and that she could see for herself, and he turned the warty thing around on the table so that it faced the window, where it sat glowing like a lamp. Ama stood beside the cabinet for a long time that afternoon, opening drawers and closing them again, just to feel the weight. Every one of them was heavy. When she slid open the bottom drawer, it was full of pale flat seeds, and it still said results not guaranteed.