🟧 Seeds are the new streetwear
The hyped market for growing rare flowers and veggies
Sarah Baird: Among the dozens of tabs kept open (seemingly in perpetuity) at the top of my browser, only one causes an immediate churn of adrenaline and anxiety every time my cursor hovers over it: the Floret Flower Farm website. For weeks now, I’ve been watching the seconds tick down on the countdown clock plastered at the top of their landing page, impatiently waiting for the rural Washington-based flower cultivators to drop their speciality-bred dahlia, zinnia and celosia seeds. These are identified with poetic or psychedelic names like “sangria mix” celosia (moody, berry-hued), “cancan girl” dahlias (flashy ROYGBIV blooms), and “Victorian wedding” zinnias (appropriately gilded). Floret’s custom seeds are created to give home flower-growers one-of-a-kind fodder for gardening TikTok and floral designers rare blooms with which to charm a new generation of choosy, personalization-driven clients.
For many Millennial and Gen Z backyard gardeners, rare and unusual seeds are a new kind of earthy cultural currency. Fueled by a pandemic lockdown-accelerated desire to develop offline, back-to-the-land hobbies — and then document them online — seeking out under-the-radar seeds and chasing down ancient plants is more of a pastime now than foaming at the mouth over the latest hypebeast sneaker drop. Flower seeds are now streetwear.
I’ve been a dedicated seed-lover (and seed saver, my root cellar is chock-full) since my husband and I moved into a 90-year-old Kentucky farmhouse in 2018 and began growing every local variety of tomato and pepper we could get our hands on. But those were different days. Pre-pandemic, the seed community possessed a communal, sharing-is-caring energy: free seed swaps dominated the landscape, in part as a way of ensuring rare plant varieties were passed down through the generations. Take-what-you-want seed libraries cropped up across the country as a way to encourage a then-gardening-skeptical younger generation to grow their own food.
Seed swaps, of course, aren’t going anywhere — I’ve both written about them and hosted my own — but thanks to seeds’ low price point compared to other status goods (they are the price of a cup of coffee versus a month’s rent) and an increase in self-reliance as a social flex (some would call it “recessioncore”), the commodification of rare and heirloom plants has led to a groundswell of intense demand for weird, wild and one-of-a-kind seeds. It startles many that high-demand seeds or starter plants go for upwards of $125 in bulk—like the potato starts I’m trying to buy from Row 7.
The rise of stylish seeds also reinforces the under-40 crowd's overall lack of interest in upholding the status symbols of generations past as the future looks increasingly uncertain both economically and environmentally. Consumption for the sake of cultivation, not just collection, has become a priority.
And there’s now a seed brand for practically every niche gardening interest, not just flowers. Hudson Valley’s Farmacie Isolde has gained a cult-like following focusing on “useful and unusual” seeds from around the world selected for their medicinal properties and historical significance. Sea holly (“once prescribed by Dioscorides”) is an eye-catching standout as well as rapunzel, an obscure, ancient, turnip-like root vegetable that one can imagine fueling a small plates trend. “It's hard to believe that something so esteemed as to have been consumed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi could fall so far from grace,” the website copy laments, reeling in Classics nerds (read: me) everywhere.
Grand Prismatic Seed is the place to go if you’re looking for natural dye seeds. Truelove Seeds focuses on “culturally significant” seeds and has an entire collection devoted to plants from the African Diaspora. The Turkmenistan-native Astrahan watermelon seeds I had my eye on from Experimental Farm Network sold out before I could pull the trigger. Seed purchasing is now a time-consuming, and emotionally-intense, process. If you don’t click fast enough, you can easily lose out.
Evocative seed package art is also as much a feature of today’s funky-seed market as the germinators themselves. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange takes a whimsical, gnome-centric approach and Row 7 Seed Company’s dreamy, watercolor-like packages provide popular social media fodder. (It’s a bit like the explosion of coffee roaster packaging design.) Row 7 also exemplifies the trickle down of the farm-to-table movement into today’s backyard gardener seed-hype: co-founded by Stone Hill’s Dan Barber in 2018, the seed outfit’s popularity means that it is regularly sold out of obscure squash seeds, like koginut and lodi, as well as the highly coveted, much-heralded badger flame beet seed. It looks like Christopher Walken’s vision of a man aflame in the original Dead Zone movie, versus most beets, which look like aubergine-hued Lisa Vanderpump ornaments.
I don’t think there’s a market for an inflated seed resale site like what StockX does for sneakerheads. But they have pushed abruptly to the front of consumer culture, which leaves me a little ambivalent. I hope the existence of hyped squashes doesn’t mean we lose sight of the seed ecosystems’s long-standing generous, DIY spirit. After all, seeds are a community good — a literal investment in the future — and we should treat them with reverence, sharing our bounty as much as possible.
Sarah Baird is a journalist who is starting a flower and bean farm and finishing her PhD, against all good advice. She lives in Kentucky.
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I’m relatively new to gardening and had massive sticker shock when I finally found Floret Flower Farm seeds in stock. 😱 Such an interesting read and now I have several new tabs open to explore. P.S. Have you seen this art project Sarah? Something tells me you’d love it. (The artist has 3 works about seeds. This is just one of them.) https://www.dornithdoherty.com/archiving-eden