In a quiet corner of a branch library, between the gardening books and the photocopier, stands an old wooden card catalogue. Its small drawers no longer hold index cards. They hold seeds: tomatoes, beans, lettuces, sunflowers, marigolds, each variety in its own paper envelope with a hand-written label. Anyone with a library card can borrow them. Joke van Dam started the seed library eight years ago.
The drawers
Mei Tanaka: Why seeds, in a library?
Joke van Dam: Because a library is a place for things that grow when you share them. Books do that. Seeds do it even better. A seed is a book you have to read by growing it. And the catalogue was sitting here empty after the cards were digitised, which felt like a waste of a beautiful piece of furniture.
MT: How does borrowing work?
JvD: In spring you take a few envelopes. You grow the plants. In autumn you let some of them go to seed, collect the seeds, dry them and bring a few back in a new envelope. So the library grows every year, and the seeds slowly adapt to the gardens and balconies of this city.
Stories in envelopes
MT: Do people actually bring seeds back?
JvD: Not all of them. Maybe half. That is fine. Some people discover that they killed everything, which is also an education. But the ones who return seeds often return stories too. We have a bean that came from a borrower’s grandmother in Suriname. A tomato that has been grown on the same balcony in Crooswijk for twelve years. They write the story on the envelope, and the next borrower gets it with the seeds.
MT: Which drawer is most popular?
JvD: Tomatoes, always. Everyone wants to grow a tomato. The marigolds are the hidden favourite. They are easy, they are cheerful, and children love collecting the seeds. We lend more marigolds to schools than anything else.
The long loan
MT: What would you like people to take away?
JvD: That some of the most valuable things in the world cannot really be owned, only looked after for a while and passed on. A seed is like that. So is a library. You borrow it, you keep it alive, you give it back a little richer than you found it.
“A seed is a book you have to read by growing it.”
