Saving Heirloom Seeds

Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape department sustains the rich genetic heritage of plants by saving seed varieties. Ongoing research enables the department to locate plant varieties appropriate to the 18th-century. Once the seed is procured, it is carefully planted and tended with the intent of eventually harvesting and saving more seed for future generations to use.

By growing heirloom plants, we help prevent extinction and promote biodiversity in plants. The Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting and preserving heritage seeds from the past, estimates that over 90 percent of the fruit and vegetable varieties grown in the United States in 1900 have since been lost.

Fortunately, more and more people are realizing the importance of saving seeds and preserving the cultural and historical heritage of plants. Through the efforts of SSE and other organizations, Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape department has been able to obtain seed from around the world. Recently we have acquired a 14th-century variety of pea from The Henry Doubleday Foundation in England, an 18th-century cockscomb from the Thomas Jefferson Center for Plants, and a London flag leek from the Vavilov Research Center in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Because heirloom plants are not hybridized but reproduce naturally through pollination, we must carefully plan where to plant the seed to keep it pure and prevent cross-pollination with other species. This year, the landscape department is assisting Rural Trades in its efforts to keep a strain of cotton pure. The seed for the Levant cotton was obtained from a Canadian seed house and is considered to be the first variety of cotton grown in Virginia. Although cotton would have been grown as a field crop and not in a town garden, the Rural Trades staff needed a relatively isolated location for growing the Levant to prevent cross-pollination because they are growing a different type of cotton at Great Hopes Plantation.