Est. 1911 · Marrow Creek
A lending library for living things
Vernal & Daughters is a seed library: the seed circulates like a book, the gardeners are the members, and the only fine is attention.
Three generations of the Vernal family have kept the register in the packing barn at the end of Quarry Lane. The arrangement has never been complicated: take seed, grow it well, save some back, return what you can. The register records every return with the grower's name, which is how a seed keeps its story.
We are deliberately small. Eight strains in the live register each season, all grown within an afternoon's drive, all open-pollinated. We would rather know eight strains deeply than list eighty we cannot vouch for.
The ledger's long rows
Six dates explain the place. The rest is handwriting.
Esther Vernal records one bean and one lettuce in a school composition book. The ledger, and the library, begin. The bean is still in the register.
The packing barn goes up from sawmill seconds. Its door still has the chalk marks borrowers used to claim packets before the register existed.
Margaret Vernal starts the storage-squash selection, on the principle that a squash should outlast the newspaper it was wrapped in.
The tomato probation begins after the early freeze. It ends in 1992 and changes how the register is written.
Ruth Vernal takes the seed bench full time and stabilizes the Ember Oxheart across eleven generations.
Forty-eight strains, two hundred fourteen borrowing households, and the same composition book, now in a fireproof box under the bench.