Urban Seeds and Their Savers: Building living archives and a liveable London
Urban seed saving is a form of ‘living,’ in situ biodiversity conservation enacted in (community) gardens, allotments, balconies or semi-wild zones in the city. In London, much of this work is performed by first, second or third generation migrants or within diaspora communities, growing and exchanging vegetable, herb and flower varieties. These seeds have been brought in from all over the world first, as part of a colonial botanical regime intent on building British imperial wealth and domination or since, in secret, often ingeniously hidden in the pockets and luggage of migrants, keen to grow food, medicine and culture.
Complicating native-invasive ecological categorisation and challenging top-down attempts to control and order urban botany (and urban life), these seeds, their savers and the networks within which they are embedded tell compelling tales of unruly nature, resistance to colonial and postcolonial borders and community care practices in the face of urban precarity. I argue that this work is grassroots conservation and these networks are co-constructing living, anti-colonial archives, actively, if quietly, building liveable cities from the ground up.