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Ken Greene taught school in California for five years. In 2000, he came east to work on a master’s degree, and he took a part-time job running the children’s programs at the public library in Gardiner, New York, a small town eighty miles up the Hudson from the Bronx. His field is special education, but he had been reading everything he could find on biodiversity. “We’ve lost a huge percentage of the vegetable varieties that existed in the nineteen-thirties,” he said recently. With help from the three- and four-year-olds who attended his story hours, he turned the library’s tiny front yard into a garden, mostly for heirloom vegetables, and in the fall the children helped him collect seeds from the plants they had grown. “I loved the fact that the seeds had stories—genetic stories, cultural stories—and I added the seeds to the library’s catalogue, so that people could check them out, like checking out a book.” The idea was that borrowers would later bring back other seeds, from their own gardens. By 2008, the project had become so all-consuming that Greene quit his teaching job to pursue it full time. He and his partner, Doug Muller—who left his own job running a teen-crisis hotline—founded the Hudson Valley Seed Library, on the site of a long-defunct Ukrainian summer camp not far from Gardiner. “People who attended the camp, back in the seventies, sometimes come by to reminisce,” he said. “The No. 1 thing they talk about is where they lost their virginity.”
Greene has a dark beard and thick circular earrings that look as though they must be painful to insert. “When I was young, I was really, really small,” he said. “I think that gave me an appreciation for seeds. Seeds are tiny, but they’re powerful.” He and Muller converted a derelict cabin into a barn, and they turned the bunk beds into trellises for peas. The H.V.S.L. now has six full-time employees, a seventy-plus-page catalogue, and members all over the country. There are four hundred seed types in this year’s collection, among them Hank’s X-Tra Special Baking Beans, which Greene propagated from a single jarful that he was given in 2004. The jar came from Peg Lotvin, his boss at the Gardiner Library. Her late father had been a farmer, in nearby Ghent, and the beans in the jar were all that remained of a cherished project of his. Each fall, he would select the most robust-looking specimens from that year’s harvest to plant the following spring—a type of genetic engineering that, so far, nobody seems to have a problem with.
Last year, the H.V.S.L. and Glynwood, an agricultural nonprofit in Cold Spring, distributed fourteen pounds of resurrected Hank’s beans among seven Hudson Valley farmers, who planted them in their own fields and then, in the fall, brought the dried pods to Glynwood for a communal “threshfest.” This year, nine local chefs used the beans to make nine versions of the classic French peasant dish cassoulet, which they served at a series of public dinners. The final dinner was held in the main house at Glynwood Farm. The evening’s other refreshments included hard cider, made from Hudson Valley apples, and violino di capra, whose name is Italian for “goat violin.” (It’s like prosciutto, but it’s made from the leg of a goat; when you slice it, you look a little as though you are playing a violin.)
Greene himself was among the diners. Shortly before the cassoulets were served, he held up three ziplock bags, each of which contained a small number of exotic-looking beans: mottled pink, eggplantish purple, near-black. He had acquired them at a conference of organic farmers, in a swap with another collector. “This is almost all there is in the world of these,” he said, and put them back in his pocket. At each place setting, near the salad fork, was a shot glass filled with Hank’s beans, which are the color of heavy cream. The beans were decorations, not party favors, Greene explained. He was going to retrieve them all at the end of the evening, for eventual planting—a necessity, because the dinner series had depleted the global inventory. (Each chef had been given about nine pounds of beans.) The person sitting on Greene’s right accidentally knocked over one of the shot glasses with a notebook in which he was writing down something Greene had said. The beans went everywhere: behind a wineglass, under the edge of a dinner plate, onto a rectangle of slate that was serving as a breadboard. Greene stopped talking and hunted them down, one by one. When he had refilled the shot glass, he moved it to the other side of the table. “I’m taking these away from you,” he said. ♦
