Everything you need to know about Cork's seed libraries
A collection of seeds stored in old, wooden library catalogue filing drawers at Hollyhill Seed Library, Cork city’s first seed library. Picture: Larry Cummins
While libraries have traditionally focused on planting seeds in the mind, Cork City Library is now offering a more literal take on seed planting with news that it will now host the third in what is fast growing into a flourishing community network of seed libraries around Cork.
The Cork City Seed Library, in the main city library, on the Grand Parade was conceived by Aisling Kett, a founder of Cork Soil Savers, an urban composting project based at Kyrl’s Quay in the city centre. The seed library itself is housed in an old recovered document cabinet since treated to a loving makeover by library worker and artist, Diana Sipova.
This vibrant new ‘library’, accessed through the Rory Gallagher Music Library, is decorated with Sipova’s botanical illustrations and a quote from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s , and the aim is to focus on locally harvested, heirloom or organic varieties to encourage growers to pursue quality of seed and, in turn, the quality of the harvested crop.
“Soil Savers is an urban composting project … in Cork city,” said Ms Kett, “challenging the idea of waste as we go. One of our goals was to set up a seed library in the city, so I reached out to the Grand Parade library. We wanted a seed library for people to share knowledge, resources and varieties, and to create a community of growers and compost enthusiasts.”
Seed libraries are community-based initiatives which ‘lend’ seeds, usually with a focus on edible plants for growing your own fruit and vegetables, with borrowers taking seeds to use in their own gardens and growing spaces and, ideally, returning seeds when their own crop is eventually grown and harvested.
The modern seed library movement began with the creation of the first library, BASIL (Bay Area Seed Interchange Library), at the Berkeley Ecology Centre, in California, in 1999, and the first to be housed in a public library was established at the Gardiner Public Library, in New York, in 2004.
Seed saving — saving seeds after harvest to use again in the following growing season — has been a fundamental element of food production since humans first began living in agrarian societies and growing their own food. The seed library movement arose from a grassroots activist response to increasing corporate control by the agro-chemical sector of seed ownership and distribution rights, including the requirement of a licence to use a company’s seeds and the prohibition of reselling seeds from a harvested crop, which has had an especially negative impact on the livelihoods of peasant farmers in the developing world.
Also, saving seeds from a crop that has adapted well to local growing conditions, such as Ireland’s very wet climate, ensures the development of hardier local varieties, protects biodiversity, and strengthens agri-food systems which increases food resilience and food sovereignty for the country as a whole.
Maria Young, Coordinator Green Spaces for Health, in Cork, was the driving force behind the city’s first seed library, established in Hollyhill Library in September 2022, with seeds supplied by the pioneering Brown Envelope Seeds, in West Cork.
“We were and are about food security and the survival of open-pollinated seed and believe communities and individuals can be the custodians of our food future by saving, storing, swapping seed, because our food system is now so compromised and it's provenance in the hands of fewer and fewer companies.”
There is also a bonus benefit in terms of social impact and local engagement.
“The library staff have been very supportive and we created a food growing garden in the same library, with the local school, Padre Pio, coming in and planting a load of spuds earlier this year, which are now ready to be harvested by the same class.
“We are also working on naturalising non native varieties — for example, we are growing the super food, amaranth, in one of our gardens, in Togher, and the seed is the granddaughter of the original seed brought over from Mexico, by one of our growers, Mabel Hernandez.”
Kinsale Seed Library, homed in the Kinsale Library, was launched in September 2024 as a project of Transition Town Kinsale with social arts practitioner Éidín Griffin, of Rebel Seed, in a wooden cabinet that originally belonged originally to the town's doctor, then renovated at Kinsale FET campus and illustrated by artist Natasha O'Shea.
Seeds are mostly local and include a range of vegetables, herbs, flowers and wildflowers and over 500 growers have accessed the library since it opened.
Ms Griffin will be hosting a series of seed saving workshops in public libraries in Cork city and county throughout September.
“You choose your seeds,” says Ms Griffin, “take the amount you need and write it on the envelope. The process is designed to engage the senses and support a community of intergenerational gardeners. Some of the most endearing notes are from children in their own handwriting, for example” ‘Muireann, age 6, 3 bean seeds’."
- For further details on the Rebel Seed seed saving workshops, see: rebelseed.ie
