PART 5 — PETRAKIS 1956
I lost forty-one plants and I did not lose the line.
That is the part I did not know when I was standing in that yard in July looking at forty-one dead things, and it is the entire reason I can write any of this without it being unbearable.
My father gave that seed away for thirty-eight years.
Not occasionally. Constantly, to anybody who stood still long enough. Neighbours, men from the press shop, two teachers at my school, a woman at the garden centre in 2011 who he talked at for twenty minutes.
And in 2016 he did a seed swap at the library in Halvern, which he attended exactly once, because my mother made him, and at which he handed out about thirty envelopes.
I put a post up on the Weald County growers’ board in the August with a photograph of one of his envelopes. His handwriting. Petrakis 1956.
I got eleven replies in four days.
Four of those people still had viable seed and three of them are still growing it. A man called Osgood Vane out past the reservoir has been growing it every year since 2016 and saving his own, which means he has nine seasons of his own selection in it now and it is technically, at this point, slightly a different tomato.
He sent me four hundred seeds in a padded envelope and would not take a dollar and wrote on the note: Your dad talked at me for half an hour. Tell him it worked.
I did not have the heart to tell him.
So there are three hundred and eleven of those seeds in a jar in my basement and I will put some in the ground in the spring after next when that soil is clear, and the line does not stop.
That is what my father was doing for forty-four years and I did not understand it until August.
He was not keeping a tomato. A tomato in one man’s yard dies with the man, or with a wheelbarrow, or with a chemical in a bag of grass.
