A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
New Photos
There is a strand of thought out there that believes any and all legislation to do with seeds is evil and unnecesary. It is wrong. Here’s why.
This spring, The Squeeze, who delights in dark-coloured sunflowers, bought a packet of Red Sun sunflower seeds. She sowed them, potted them on, planted them out and waited patiently for them to bloom. This they did a couple of days ago. They were not Red Sun. They were sunflower yellow. All of them.
That’s the fundamental problem with seeds. They carry no outward signs of the particular variety within. As, I wrote, long ago, “a dishonest merchant can take the worst rubbish and label it as a good variety with a fine reputation. Buyers will be none the wiser until the crop fails to meet their expectations.”1 Sharp practice was practically the norm in the 19th century, either passing off trash as something of note or stealing someone else’s variety and renaming it as your own.
In 1885 William Robinson, editor of The Garden, called for “a body composed of representative seedsmen and growers” to “seek out and give their true names to all the older and finer types … and to find some way to prevent confusion in the future.” That body eventually materialised in various different forms, most notably the European Common Catalogues of vegetable and agricultural species, and others including UPOV, the Union of Plant Varieties, and various forms of national plant patent systems. Other bodies ensure that seeds will germinate and will not be diseased.
Much has been written about the evils perpetrated by these and other bodies. Europe, especially, with its everything-not-permitted-is-forbidden logic, presided over large losses of cultivated plant biodiversity. Campaigners against the EU legislation have long sought exemptions for the exchange of unregistered seed among farmers and growers. I’ve lost track of where things stand right now, but if these really are exchanges among people who know one another, then I would hope that the standard technique of public shaming will go some way towards keeping people honest.
Name and shame, if you can
If, instead, opening up EU legislation is just a ruse to let people sell smallish quantities of who knows what, it will be extremely difficult to hold growers to their word. Managing a system of variety identification is expensive, and one reason why seed growers rejoiced when the EU offered them the chance to abandon less profitable open pollinated varieties.
Given the acute distress visited on The Squeeze by these imposter sunflowers, what can we do? Alas, name and shame is not an option. Because Red Sun sunflowers are flowers, not vegetables nor agricultural crops2 they are not registered in the Common Catalogue. They do, however, carry a Plant Passport. That tells me that the seeds were inspected by Italian phytosanitary experts 08-1164. Of course, they have no interest in the actual kind of flower, only that the seeds have no plant health issues. It also says they were produced in Germany, and that there is a traceability code, which may or may not be FC001-H003159. Who might that trace back to?
I have not been able to find any online database that will identify the producer (bearing in mind that seeds are not necessarily produced — grown — by the company whose name is on the packet). That name happens to be Hortus, a subsidiary of Verisem which also owns Franchi Sementi, which may well be where they were bought. Franchi’s website says that seed purity is 95%. Not in our packet it wasn’t.
Thank you for reading my rant. And no, I don’t expect anyone to take responsibility.
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