[Photograph above: Carol Sharp for Garden Organic

When you’re browsing the seed catalogues and choosing what to grow in the vegetable plot next year – make heritage vegetable seeds a part of your plans. By planting these horticulture heirlooms, we’re helping to safeguard their future – and ours

If you want a tasty slice of history with your next meal, sow and grow an heirloom seed. From Uncle Bert’s Purple kale to William’s Tiger bean and ‘Best of All’ tomatoes, these golden oldies of the garden not only sound good, they taste good too. But hurry, they may not be around for long.

Thanks to large-scale intensive farming, which has seen modern vegetable seeds bred to produce high yielding, slow-ripening produce (often free from those knobbly bits) – thousands of traditional seeds have begun to fade away.  

Couple this with short-sighted seed trade restrictions that insist every seed must be registered with an official National List (an expense that’s only worthwhile for commercial growers and varieties), the seeds our grandparents might have grown are beginning to disappear. In fact, they are declining so significantly that some are becoming extinct – an issue that threatens not only the future of our plots but the planet too.

Growing for taste

“Home growers want seeds that grow well in gardens and end up as a tasty plate of food. Heritage varieties have passed the test of time, valued by gardeners and seed savers for generations”, says Catrina Fenton, head of the Heritage Seed Library, Europe’s oldest community seed library.  

Tomatoes are a great example. Mainstream varieties are bred with thick skins to ensure they survive the rigours of harvesting, transportation and display. But a century ago they would have been picked fresh from the garden, and therefore would have had thinner and more delicious skins. Tall peas were also grown a 100 years ago but, with the advent of the combine harvester, dwarf peas became the only ones deemed fit for market.

Dig into ‘ugly veg’

“Old heirloom varieties represent centuries of careful selection and breeding for small-scale growers. And that’s because gardeners want taste over looks, not uniform cauliflower heads that all come up at once,” says Kate McEvoy, from seed company Real Seeds, which offers the best open pollinated and heritage varieties for home growers. “We’re not growing for the likes of Tesco. Whatever happened to qualities such as flavour, adaptability and tenderness?”

“You’ll be told new, modern varieties produce more ‘uniform’ or ‘straighter’ veg – but it’s really because supermarkets have set incredibly rigid limits on size and shape. People seem to forget that we want to eat and enjoy these things – they’re not just a commodity.”

Kate believes the modern-day hybrid or ‘F1’ seed has been a “public relations victory over the small grower”. All Real Seeds are open pollinated, which means any collected seed will grow into plants with the same characteristics as their parents, and the company is passionate about allowing people to collect and grow again.

“F1 seed is the result of a cross between two different but heavily inbred parents so any seed saved from these plants will give a whole mix of shapes and types, usually producing a poor crop,” says Kate.

Beetroot ‘Dewing’s Early’ – photograph: Carol Sharp for Garden Organic

Eating a slice of history

F1 or not, behind almost all heritage seeds there’s not just a great vegetable or fruit, but a great story to tell.

Horticultural charity, Garden Organic, has been running its Heritage Seed Library for over 40 years and conserves and grows 800 varieties of unusual or endangered seeds – with some made available to the public each year.  

New to the list this year is climbing French bean ‘Angel’, which has a pattern around the seed resembling an angel. Legend suggests that, during WW1, a French pastor planted the beans above his buried artefacts to prevent them falling into enemy hands. The beans his plants produced bore the marks we now see (below), with the angels guarding his buried treasures. 

The plant produces beautiful orange-red flowers followed by flat, green pods packed with pretty beans, which taste perfect once dried. 

French Angel bean
The French ‘Angel’ Bean with its celestial pattern – photo: Garden Organic

There’s also the ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ bean, so-called because it may have once been carried by the native North American tribes when they were driven out of their homeland in the 1830s. And ‘Ice/Crystal Wax’, dating back to at least 1882, was used as a forcing bean for hothouses. The green pods lighten with age to almost silver-white giving, with a little imagination, the impression of icicles!

Taking a step back in time

Or how about growing seeds from Tutankhamen’s tomb?

“We have a set of peas called ‘mummy peas’ in our library that, the story goes, were found inside the tomb by archaeologist Howard Carter in the 1920s and passed to Lord Carnarvon and his gardener to germinate,” says Catrina.

Indeed, many heritage seeds hail from the Victorian era – a crucial time in plant breeding. They give us a tantalising taste of the kitchen gardens, and of course the grand dining rooms, of that era.

At the Victorian Walled Garden at Normanby Hall in North Lincolnshire, head gardener Paul Beetham and his team specialise in growing Victorian vegetable cultivars, with the garden restored to reflect its 19th century heyday.

“It’s truly like stepping back in time,” says Paul. “The garden provides a fascinating insight into the world before supermarkets and imports, and by supporting the conservation of these plants we are keeping them available for future generations.”

Growing for the planet

In truth, our love of heritage seeds is much more than misplaced nostalgia. In her book, Seeds – Safeguarding Our Future (The Ivy Press, £19.99), Carolyn Fry outlines how much we have to thank seeds for.

“Seeds helped humans to evolve and civilisation to develop…and played a vital part in creating bio diverse ecosystems…” she writes. “Having helped us to become the most successful species on Earth, they may also be our best hope for saving us from ourselves.”

Indeed, with more than 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of our food supply chain lost in the last century, heirloom seeds could be the key to preserving that variety.

“In Europe, we’ve lost around 2,000 vegetable cultivars since the 1970s. In America around 96 per cent of the commercial vegetable cultivars available in 1903 are now extinct,” says garden historian Dr Toby Musgrave, author of Heritage Fruits and Vegetables (Thames & Hudson, £38). “Right now, for example, all commercially grown bananas that descend from the Cavendish banana are getting attacked by a fungus.

“Thanks to this global monoculture, the entire crop could get wiped out. But if we conserve the seeds that have survived, we can draw upon them in the future.”

Demand more heritage veg

With Britain on the brink of leaving the EU, however, only time will tell whether it will be easier or harder to get heritage seeds in the future. And we don’t just need to grow heritage seeds, or eat the tasty results, we need to demand them – and, more importantly, share them.

With veg seeds so widely (and cheaply) available – hanging like colourful bags of sweets from the stands in garden centres – less of us are saving our own seed these days.

Or try Pea ‘Purple podded’ – photo: Carol Sharp for Garden Organic

“Hand collect your seed and you can create ‘bespoke’ plants for your plot. These will be adapted to your specific climate, soil and conditions – and selected for factors that you enjoy such as the size of leaves, or fruit or colour,” says Catrina, who, via the Heritage Seed Library offers six free packs of heritage seeds per year as part of the membership fee. “With your own seeds you can control the entire cycle so you know where that seed has come from – and it’s the ultimate in reuse and recycling.”

Indeed, thanks to seed guardians like Catrina and Kate – and hundreds of amateur growers – many heritage seeds have made a comeback.

“We’ve managed to get several varieties, including the crimson flowered broad bean and Champion of England peas back onto the National List and that’s a real triumph,” says Catrina. “Our library relies on the hard work and donations of hundreds of gardeners who have saved seeds or held on to seed from their grandparents.

“Who knows, there could be gardeners all over Britain who could play a part in saving our growing heritage in the future.”


Heritage vegetables veg to try

Wizard Field Bean. A more robust relative of the broad bean – and formerly only grown here as green manure – producing many more pods from a smaller plant over a longer period and without those tough old skins.

Sutherland Kale. A resilient and vigorous kale, once grown by the Scottish crofters, which was thought to be extinct until it was donated to Real Seeds by an 80-year-old Sunderland woman.

Sibley Squash. A great old variety from the ‘Hiram Sibley & Co’ seed catalogue of 1850, which ripens early and produces lots of grey pear-shaped squash with dry, dense yellow flesh that grow sweeter as they’re stored.

Bath Cos Lettuce. Listed in James Carter’s Catalogue of a Choice Collection of Floricultural, Vegetable and Agricultural Seeds of 1842 (what a mouthful!). This variety was described by a contributor to The Gardener (1867): “This ought to be in every garden. No other variety can surpass it”. The large, dark green leaves have a rust-coloured tinge and are flavourful, crisp and juicy.

Garden Organic have released a special 2021 heritage seed calendar, featuring Carol Sharp’s beautiful photographs. Go to Garden Organic to order yours.

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