Passion for plants

Seed company owner scours local gardens

By Jomay Steen, Journal staff | Friday, September 19, 2008

Previous Page

Share

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• NewsVine
• Fark

Print

Email

Nothing makes a seed company owner happier than finding an heirloom plant flowering without fuss along the fence of a vegetable garden. Add to that a row of beautiful artichokes a few weeks from harvest, and it’s a great beginning for Barbara Melera’s first tour of South Dakota.

“I think the most remarkable thing was Vaud’s artichokes,” she said. “There was a whole row that communicated to me that this was a gardener who has solved the artichoke problem. I have people who are fanatics in zones six and seven, who can’t grow artichokes.”

Melera, owner of D. Landreth Seed Company, the oldest seed company in nation and the fourth oldest corporation in America, arrived in Rapid City last week to an ambitious schedule of garden tours, lectures and quests to find the right flower, vegetable or fruit to illustrate her company’s seed catalog.

With her digital camera in hand, she began the first of two garden tours Friday at Vaud and Harold Oberlander’s home. To ensure for her customers the authentic color, shape and size of her seed company’s products, Melera takes all of her own photographs.

“It gives them a real good idea of the thing they’re going to grow,” she said of her photographs. Some of those photos in her catalog may come from gardens here in South Dakota, she said. “They’ll always show up in our newsletter,” she added.

Melera and her husband, Peter, bought the seed company five years ago.

A former venture capitalist, it fed into her passions as a gardener and history buff. Her husband is a trained botanist. Nearly three years ago, they uprooted the company and moved it to New Freedom, Pa., as a way to make it entirely their own. She laughs at their early work of sorting through boxes and bags of seed buried from years of neglect. Her husband threw out a wormy box of Boston Marrow squash, which they were horrified to find out was the last stock of its kind.

“Within our first six weeks of owning the company, we had completely eliminated a line of squash,” she said with a laugh.

An Iowa source was able to not only replace the rare seeds, but after a two-year production cycle, it replaced them using a 1986 Landreth seed packet that had rattled around in his father’s seed box.

“That says something about the quality of Landreth seeds,” she said.

Pointing out a cluster of bright red zinnias bordering the Oberlanders’ deck, Melera said Landreth introduced zinnias to American gardens in 1798. They came from seeds cultivated in Mexico, mutating into double zinnias in 1850. John Bodger & Sons, a California seed company, then worked with the double zinnias to introduce a variety of colors by the 1930s. “They’re one of two that still have some ownership of the original company,” she said of the Bodgers.

She then caught sight of the Hollyhock nigra.

A ravenous deer had munched through most of its broad leaves, but the nearly black petals of its flowers were left intact. It was grown from seeds harvested from Vaud Oberlander’s parents’ gardens in New England, N.D. Grown without a lot of fuss or bother, it wasn’t considered a jewel by anyone except Melera.

“I have never seen one the color of Vaud’s,” she said.

Melera took photos, seeds and planned to grown the vintage plant at her New Freedom seed station. If all goes well, it may eventually produce stock for other gardeners wanting the heirloom plants.

“You’ll probably find this in our 2010 catalog,” she said.