Heirloom Seeds: A Love Story

This week’s column is about a 200-year-old seed company, how it almost disappeared and the very tangled web that made me aware of it.

The company is Comstock, Ferre & Co. and it’s located in Wethersfield, Connecticut. It’s a place you may want to visit in the next couple of years. The history of this company and the people who have made sure that its traditions have continued is fascinating, but recently it nearly succumbed to the shrinking world of retail seed options for home gardeners.

My part of the story begins in the early 1980s when I decided to follow a passion and became involved in the growing and propagation of herbaceous perennials. As a result of my work, I became one of the founders of the Perennial Plant Association, which is now a large trade group that promotes perennials, growers and research in perennials.

Another of the founders was Pierre Bennerup. He was previously a wine merchant but he too became deeply involved in perennials. Mr. Bennerup has owned Sunny Border Nurseries, an 80-year-old family-owned business in Connecticut, for more than 40 years. Sunny Border is a wholesale grower on more than 200 acres and it not only introduced new perennials but has also introduced new varieties from England and Europe. Mr. Bennerup was one of a group of a half dozen plantsmen that have to be given credit for the revival of perennials in the U.S.

My business, The Hampton Gardener, also grew into a modest wholesale perennial business but was sold to a larger nursery. After a short stint consulting for the new business and then taking a couple of years off, I accepted a job in Katonah, New York managing a modest estate with horses, cattle, goats, sheep and one of the most magnificent perennial gardens on the East Coast.

The Fisher family owned the property and Laura Fisher was a gardener extraordinaire and had an insatiable enthusiasm to learn and grow. Hitch Lyman was her garden designer and he is nothing short of a walking, talking encyclopedia of horticulture. Between the two of them, I couldn’t have asked for a more challenging and exciting place to work and learn. It didn’t hurt, either, that the job came with two wonderful greenhouses, plenty of cold frame space and limitless quantities of composted manure.

As it turned out, just months after I moved from Southampton to Katonah, the Fishers informed me that they were getting a divorce. He would move and live in the city full time, she would live on the farm full time. My fear was of a very short-lived employment, but the job of my dreams lasted for nearly five years while the divorce was worked out and the property sold.

In those five years, we continued to expand the gardens and spend like there was no tomorrow. In the process of all this spending and planting I was pleased to find out that both Ms. Fisher and Mr. Lyman were good friends with Mr. Bennerup.

Now there is one person who I have left out of this mix. Her name is Pamela Peck.

Ms. Peck was Ms. Fisher’s personal assistant and as such she became familiar with all the plants, seeds, vendors and contractors that we dealt with, so she became quite a gardener in her own right. She stayed with Ms. Fisher for a bit longer than I did then moved to northern Connecticut.

One day, after being out of touch for several years, Ms. Peck called me and imparted that she was now managing a retail nursery and garden center that Mr. Bennerup had purchased called Comstock, Ferre & Co.

I don’t think things worked out too well even though she loved the job initially. But I learned a few years later that Ms. Peck had apparently fallen in love with Ms. Fisher’s brother and she vacated to the left coast where I presume they now live happily ever after.

So, what happened to Comstock, Ferre & Co.? Good question.

From time to time I would see the company’s seed packets on a retail rack in a garden shop but that was it. I’d been out of touch with Mr. Bennerup, and Ms. Fisher had since sold her most recent house and was living in Manhattan and Cape Cod. Mr. Lyman remains upstate near Cornell, where he’s the world’s maven on snowdrops.

Last spring I saw a trade piece stating that Mr. Bennerup had just sold Comstock, Ferre & Co to Jere and Emilee Gettle. You may know the Gettles from their other endeavor, the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. Or perhaps you might remember the company from this column last February when I referred to the Baker Creek catalog as “nothing short of spectacular.”

For the rest of the story and how the Gettles ended up with Comstock, you’re going to have to get the 2011 catalog and read the whole story. It’s a wonderful saga with a terrific ending in which two people seem to be saving a business that anyone else might have plundered or destroyed.

If you’re not familiar with heirloom seeds, this is a great place to start. Why heirlooms? Oh, where can I start?

Heirloom vegetables and flowers—even fruit trees—bring back varieties that have been lost and forgotten. The advent of chemical agriculture in the mid-20th century and genetic selection (as opposed to genetic engineering that we see now) had the promise of higher yields and more variety, as well as disease- and pest-resistance. What we’ve been left with however, is tasteless vegetables, scentless flowers and the near loss of varieties that served man well for generations.

Thanks to insightful entrepreneurs such as the Gettles, many of the vegetables and flowers of our gardening heritage are being brought back. They may not be as disease-free or as prolific as our modern marvels but take a taste of a garden-grown Tendersweet carrot, Golden Bantam corn or Burpee’s Globe tomato and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

And since heirlooms are not genetically modified or hybridized, you can even save your own seed from year to year. Check out heirlooms, check out Comstock, thank the Gettles. Keep growing.