The Seed Detective

Ever wonder how peas, kale, asparagus, beans, squash and sweetcorn ended up on our plates? Well, so did Adam Alexander.

Adam Alexander is The Seed Detective. His passion for vegetables was ignited when he tasted an unusual sweet pepper with a fiery heart while on a film-making project in Ukraine. Smitten by its flavour, Adam began to seek out local growers of endangered heritage and heirloom varieties in a mission to take home seeds to grow and share so that he could enjoy their delicious taste – and save them from being lost forever.

In The Seed Detective, Adam shares his own stories of seed hunting, with the origin stories behind many of our everyday vegetable heroes. Taking us on a journey that began when we left the life of the hunter-gatherer to become farmers, he tells tales of globalisation, political intrigue, colonisation and serendipity – describing how these vegetables and their travels have become embedded in our food cultures.

‘We are a nation of vegetable growers’, says Adam, ‘and this book explores the wonderful world of rare and endangered heritage and heirloom vegetables – and why we must keep growing them and saving their seed, not only for our gardening and culinary pleasure, but to pass these stories on – vegetables are truly our history on a plate.’

Adam Alexander is a consummate storyteller thanks to forty years as an award-winning film and television producer, but his true passion is collecting rare, endangered but, above all, delicious vegetables from around the world. He lectures widely on his work discovering and conserving rare, endangered garden crops, is a board member of the national charity Garden Organic, and his knowledge and expertise on growing out vegetables for seed is highly valued by the Heritage Seed Library, for which he is a seed guardian. Adam shares seeds with other growers and gene banks in the USA, Canada and the EU, and he is currently growing out seed of heritage Syrian vegetables to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. He has appeared on Gardeners' World and the Great British Food Revival, CNN's Going Green and Radio New Zealand.