Talks

Adam Alexander: The Seed Detective

Where:

Castle Garden Stage - Castle Gardens

When:

12th September 2025
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

Adam Alexander: The Seed Detective in conversation with Ross Underwood - Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables

Across the world, chefs, farmers, plant scientists and everyday growers are doing something extraordinary: creating new generations of fruit, vegetables and cereals that will flourish locally, taste delicious, increase diversity and contribute to a sustainable and robust food future.

In The Accidental Seed Heroes, Adam Alexander dons his seed- detective homburg to meet these twenty-first century seed heroes, who are not only championing traditional varieties but also breeding delicious new ones that will be more resilient and better-equipped to deal with the shocks of a changing climate.

Taking us around the world to meet some of the most inspiring seed heroes – from Rajasthan, India, to his own back garden in Wales, across Europe to the remote regions of southern Albania, and into Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley – Adam reminds us that Indigenous cultures and rural communities have been expertly breeding seeds for millennia.

At its heart, The Accidental Seed Heroes is a celebration of locally and sustainably grown produce, whether traditional or innovative, that is the foundation of all our food cultures. Adam shows that the ability to save and adapt seeds should be a right for all, not something to be controlled by corporations patenting seeds for profit; that everyone who grows food, whether amateur or professional, can be a seed hero – building resilience and returning fertility to our soils and biodiversity to our land.

Adam Alexander’s first book, The Seed Detective, told the heritage stories of our everyday veg heroes. It was chosen as one of Radio 4’s The Food Programme’s Books of the Year by Dan Saladino and shortlisted for the Garden Media Guild’s Garden Book of the Year.

Adam is a consummate storyteller, thanks to forty years as an award-winning film and television producer, but his true passion is collecting rare, endangered and, above all, delicious vegetables from around the world. He lectures widely on his work discovering and conserving rare, endangered garden crops and is a board member of the national charity Garden Organic. His knowledge and expertise on growing out vegetables for seed is highly valued by the Heritage Seed Library, for which he is a seed guardian. Adam shares seeds with other growers and gene banks in the USA, Canada and the EU, and he is currently growing out seeds of heritage Syrian vegetables to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. He has appeared on Gardeners’ World, the Great British Food Revival, CNN’s Going Green and Radio New Zealand.

www.theseeddetective.co.uk