Seed-bombing

Last year at about this time, I learned about yarn bombing. This year, seed bombing! Until now, I had thought of gardening only as a passive pastime. Not so! Seed-bombing is a form of garden activism that has been around for years, but has recently made news.  At a recent seed-bombing workshop in Washington, D.C., Emmy Gran taught participants how to become "guerrilla gardeners" by making and lobbing seed balls - plus the art of captioning this green form of civil disobedience with a little biodegradable moss graffiti. A teenage gardener offers instructions and a Mom in Vancouver, British Columbia, explains, "Seed balls, simply put, are a method for distributing seeds by encasing them in a mixture of clay and compost. This protects the seeds by preventing them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or from blowing away. Seed balls are scattered directly on the ground, not planted....I like ‘em because they’re easy to chuck over fences into empty lots." Aerial reforestation has been used on a smaller scale to beautify and reclaim vacant inner-city properties in cities like Detroit (see list of successful projects here) and on a larger scale (from planes) to reintroduce vegetation onto land devastated by forest fires or other natural disasters like Haiti and countries in Africa.

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Selected past posts about seeds:

Pleistocene plants

Some SEM seeds

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Mexican jumping beans

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What anthropologist Art Aufderheide says about my new book Dissection on Display:

"Things have slowed down enough for me to finish reading your most recent book and what a book! Since I have a personal interest in the evolution of the autopsy, I know what an enormous effort you must have expended in gathering the often obscure sources. Yet your presentation of them  reads more like an action, especially the section on "bodysnatching"...Historically, dissection with the anatomic knowledge gained must precede the era of the autopsy. This is where your book comes in....one can easily see the enormous vacuum your book fills, especially  the medieval period....Sincerest congratulations again for an enormous contribution to the history of dissection."