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Ad Rates / Articles / Classified Ads / Editorial / Home / Links / Showtime   Heirloom seeds for historic gardens   List Mary Brittain Next   Heirloom Seeds - Living Antique Plants From the Past By Mary Brittain Scratch the surface of any lover of antiques and you'll find a collector at heart: there is nothing quite like the thrill of the search for that particular piece that would round out your collection so nicely, or the frisson of excitement you experience when you come across an unexpected treasure.   And there is definitely nothing like the glow of contentment that comes from being surrounded by articles from another era - crafted with care, from a simpler, slower time and absolutely irreplaceable.   The fact that they have actually survived for hundreds of years, often handed down through generations, always fills me with awe.   Consider, then, the miracle of antique, or “heirloom” plants. These are plants that were grown in gardens of the past - monastery gardens, medieval herbers, Victorian kitchen gardens, pioneer plots - and that can still be found today. Like other heirlooms, they have survived because they were often handed down lovingly through generations; but unlike most antiques, they couldn't be tucked away in a safe place and left on their own. Seeds are living organisms – to survive through hundreds of years, they had to be grown out every few years and their seed gathered again.   And just as other antiques reflect times when care and attention were paid to quality craftsmanship, heirloom plants possess attributes that were valued in a past that moved more slowly, paid closer attention, involved all the senses and could be said to have had finer aesthetics. So you tend to get flowers that are more refined than many of the large, flashy ”bigger is better” modern hybrids; or flowers and herbs that are highly fragrant, because people liked to stop and smell them as they walked through their gardens; or vegetables that actually have taste, because they were grown and saved by homeowners in their backyard food plots or small farmers, at a time when taste was important in food (novel concept). You also get vegetables that come in all kinds of sizes and shapes and colours, because everyone grew their own food locally and that helped preserve the broad diversity of plant life that was available.   As you may have gathered by now, I am an antique plant collector. I am obsessed with antique, or “heirloom” as they are more commonly known, plants. My husband and I currently have a collection of almost 600 varieties of heirloom seeds, and have a small seed company that promotes the preservation of heirloom plants by reintroducing them into gardens. It's quite a challenge - old varieties of plants are disappearing at a frightening rate (remember, if they're not grown out every few years, they die out).   Eighty percent of the plant varieties that were available for sale at the turn of the last century are now extinct. How important is this? Extremely - because heirloom plants are the holders of the genetic biodiversity of the plant world. They carry the genetic traits for disease-and-pest resistance, drought-tolerance, adaptability, colour, fragrance, shape and taste. When a variety dies out, its genetic makeup goes with it. And, despite the wonders of science, technology and the genome project, nobody has figured out yet how to create new genes.   Here are some examples of how heirloom plants differ so much from the modern hybrids that you find in mainstream garden centres:   Fragrance: Sweet Peas are delightful little annual vines that produce beautiful pea-like flowers in vivid hues all summer, and that are extremely fragrant…or at least, they were. After all, that is how they came by their common name. The original sweet pea was sent to a schoolteacher in England by a Franciscan monk named Father Cupani in 1629 – and was hence named ‘Cupani’s Original.’ Entranced by the intense fragrance, English gardeners embraced the sweet pea and by the end of the 19th century there were over 250 varieties available. By this time, the plant breeders were seriously at work developing newer and “better” strains – after all, if a normal sweet pea had three flowers to a stem, wouldn't it be better to have four? And the flowers weren't very large - what about making larger, more brightly-coloured flowers? Or flowers with frilly edges? You get the picture – but on the way to bigger and better, there was one little trait that the breeders, in their zeal, forgot to focus on: fragrance. Consequently, by the mid-20th century, sweet peas were no longer sweet. Those of us living today might never have had the opportunity to know what a sweet pea smells like (and it is incomparable), if not for the fact that a handful of the older, small-flowered, threeblooms-to-a-branch varieties managed to be saved. And the genes for fragrance have been extracted from these and re-introduced to modern sweet peas. ‘Cupani’s Original’, by the way, said to be the most potent, was one of those that managed to survive and is still commercially available.   Colour and shape: We have been trained to believe that carrots are long and orange, cucumbers are long and green, and beets and tomatoes are round and red. But the reality is that originally all these veggies came in a wondrous rainbow of colours and all shapes and sizes. They gradually became homogenized with the advent of industrial agriculture and mechanical harvesting - where everything has to fit neatly into shipping containers and huge farms grow the same two or three varieties of a crop that are then shipped around the world and to every supermarket.   But consider this - before the 1700s, carrots were available in purple, red, yellow and white, as well as orange. They came as large, 1 lb. heart-shaped varieties like the ‘Oxheart’(1884) or little 4” cuties like the French heirloom ‘Little Finger’ (the true baby carrot - the ones in the grocery stores are just pareddown regular carrots). Both of these are excellent for heavy, clay soils. ‘Dragon’ carrot - a truly magnificent variety with dark purple skin and an orange interior with a yellow core - is a descendent of the original Afghan purple carrots, and has a spicy edge to its taste. Cucumbers, too, came in all shapes, lengths and sizes. ‘Lemon,’ developed in 1894, looks just like a lemon - round and bright yellow, about 2-3” across. ‘White Wonder,’ from 1890, has pure white skin. Heirloom beets provide a rainbow of colour: ‘Chioggia,’ an Italian heirloom, has concentric rings of pink and white throughout its interior; ‘Golden,’ from the 1820s, is just that; ‘Albino’ is a very sweet, pure white beet; and ‘Bull’s Blood’ is an English heirloom from 1840 with spectacular dark purple-red leaves that are wonderful as greens.   Taste : This is best exemplified when we look at tomatoes, because all of us can relate to the “cardboard tomatoes” in the produce sections, and many of us complain about not being able to find a tomato that “tastes like they used to” Heirloom tomatoes shine in this regard; they were selected and saved for taste, as well as colour and shape - but taste was paramount. Once you have tasted an heirloom tomato, there is no going back. There are actually a fairly large number of heirloom tomato varieties still available; some of my favourites include ‘Yellow Pear’ - a tiny, pear-shaped, bright yellow tomato from 1805 with a delightful sweet taste; ‘Cherokee Purple’ - originally grown by the Cherokee and commercially available since before 1890, this black/purple tomato is one of our most popular, with a taste that is both rich and sweet; ‘Mortgage Lifter’ – a large, red tomato with a taste so incredible it is reputed to have enabled its creator to pay off his mortgage during the Great Depression. ‘Garden Peach’ - developed in 1898, this unusual tomato has yellow, fuzzy skin with a pink blush (just like a peach), a sweet/tart taste and is an excellent keeper.   Beauty: Heirloom flowers possess a grace of form and line that is unequalled in modern hybrids, as far as I'm concerned. Take, for example, our original native Eastern Columbine ( Aquilegia canadensis ) with its long, graceful spurs and its narrow, tubular orange and yellow flowers that seem to glow. The Jesuits were so taken with these when they arrived here that they had introduced them to France by 1635. Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), another Ontario native plant, grows to a stately 3’ with beautiful, light-blue, lipped flowers clustered tightly to its stem in late summer. Scottish Bluebells (Campanula rotundifolia), in Scottish gardens since 1600 and brought over by the Highlanders, also happens to be native to this area. This delightful little plant appears to be delicate but is extremely hardy - producing clusters of tiny, blue bells nodding above rounded leaves for most of the summer and often one of the last plants flowering in my garden.   Why grow heirlooms? You may have a century house and want to have gardens that are period-appropriate; you may want to expand your love of antiques to the world of plants; you may want to help preserve our genetic biodiversity by adding some historic plants to your garden (and maybe even saving some of the seed); you may be captivated by some of the histories and legends surrounding these ancient plants; or you may just want to rediscover the sensory delights that come from being surrounded by these living antiques.   Photo 1: Lobelia   Photo 2: Garden peach tomato:   Photo 3: Lemon cucumbers   Photo 4: "Mortgage-lifter" red tomato   Mary Brittain and her husband, Dan, operate The Cottage Gardener, a certified organic heirloom seedhouse and nursery in Crooked Creek, Ontario, near Newtonville.     Return to top of page   This Is Livin' Publishing © 2008 581 8th Line West, RR1 Hastings, ON, K0L 1Y0 Phone/Fax: 705-696-1833   webmaster