Throughout The Overstory, seeds represent hope for future life and new growth, as well as resiliency and adaptation in the face of disaster.
Seeds feature prominently in several characters’ storylines. The book begins with the origin of the Hoel chestnut tree, a magnificent tree that manages to escape the American chestnut blight (at least for a time) all because Jørgen Hoel accidentally brings six chestnuts with him from New York to Iowa and plants them. Over a century later, Neelay Mehta’s father compares their early computer and coding work to a tiny seed producing an enormous banyan fig tree, and this image of the potential for endless branching growth sticks with Neelay for the rest of his life. Most notably, Patricia Westerford starts a seed vault, traveling the world and gathering seeds to keep in her subzero bunker in the hopes of preserving dying species for the future. Patricia is notably pessimistic about the future of humanity, but she has total faith in the patience of trees and in a seed’s ability to survive and thrive. In all of these instances, the act of gathering or planting seeds (whether real or imagined) is a way for characters to remain hopeful and envision the future as something that is beautiful and limitless in its potential, like a tree’s ever-growing branches.
Seeds are not only full of potential but also resilient to various stresses and traumas—and some even require such experiences to properly germinate. As the narrative notes in several places, some seeds require fire to open, some need to be frozen or digested, and some can survive for thousands of years and still germinate. This represents life’s ability to adapt even to man-made catastrophes like worldwide deforestation. The Overstory encourages readers to take comfort in the fact that although humanity might not survive to see the future of seeds like those in Patricia’s vault, life itself—as symbolized by those seeds—will always continue.
Seeds Quotes in The Overstory
"I want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees in the world as there were before we came down out of them. […] Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we've barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once."
"You want to start an ark."
She smiles at the word, but shrugs. It's as good as any. "I want to start an ark."
"Where you can keep . . ." The strangeness of the idea gets him. A vault to store a few hundred million years of tinkering. Hand on the car door, he fixes on something high up in a cedar. "What . . . would you do with them? When would they ever…?"
"Den, I don't know. But a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years."
One passage keeps springing back, every time fear or scientific rigor makes her prune it. Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
[…]
As soon as she seals the carton with packing tape, she cracks it open again. The last line of the last chapter is still wrong. She looks at what she has, although the sentence has long since burned itself into permanent memory. With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.
There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they'll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
Seeds Symbol Timeline in The Overstory
