Thanks to the very good offices of our friends at Seed Savers Exchange, I now have a copy of the most recent (6th) edition of the Garden Seed Inventory. I wanted this in order to see whether the loss of The D. Landreth Seed Company, America’s oldest, as it happens, while tragic for the business and its customers, would also be a great loss for agricultural biodiversity. Long answer short: not so much.
The Garden Seed Inventory is a catalogue of catalogues, listing all the varieties available from all the catalogues SSE can get its hands on. That makes it a very useful snapshot of what is out there (in the US), how widely available it is, and the ebbs and flows in comercially-available diversity of crops and varieties. The Introduction to the book contains lots of analysis of this type, and I thought I remembered that it listed all the varieties that are available only from a single supplier and each supplier’s “unique” varieties. It doesn’t.
It does, however, list the 27 companies (10% of the total number covered by the inventory) that list the most unique varieties. D. Landreth is not among them. It also lists the companies that had introduced the most “new unique varieties”. Perhaps unexpectedly, there’s quite an overlap with the “most uniques”. and D Landreth isn’t in that list either. All of which suggests to me that while the passing of D Landreth would indeed be sad for its owners and customers, it would not be an immediate disaster for commercially-available agricultural biodiversity in the United States.
Does D Landreth have any varieties not available elsewhere? That one is difficult to answer using the Inventory. More than 450 pages of closely spaced entries is a lot to look through, searching for those with a single source coded La1. It ought to be a doddle from the database that stores the original records, but I’m sure SSE has much else on its mind at the moment. Mind you, if 45 owners of the Inventory were to scan 10 pages each …