Tending seeds and traditions

One morning last week, the force of nature that is William Woys Weaver was getting his hands dirty at Roughwood, his rustic manse in Devon, planting flats of heritage seeds that had been tottering dangerously close to expiration.

Various pole limas were on the menu this particular day - Sadie's Climbing Baby Lima, among them, and one of Doctor Martin's coveted Chester County beauties (once sold for a whopping 25 cents a seed), and the purple Blue Shackamaxon Treaty Bean, and old Quaker beans, and seeds that his late grandmother had squirreled away in jars in her own freezer.

Out of the earth, of course, seeds don't last forever. So if an envelope of one of Weaver's inventory (which at 3,000 heirloom seeds is something of a Fort Knox of American germplasm) is labeled 2007, you can probably take a pass. But if it's dated 2006, watch out: "You better get it in the ground."

This is one of Weaver's cyclical chores, and last week he was being ably assisted by Nancy Wygant, a thin braid trailing down her back. She oversees the kitchen garden at Bartram's Garden along the banks of the lower Schuylkill.

But as usual he had an anxiety-inducing number of other plates spinning - leading garden seminars, writing books on food history (his latest, his 15th, is a lavishly illustrated volume titled Culinary Ephemera, due out in October from University of California Press), and this summer, launching a dauntingly ambitious effort to create a center for the study of local and regional foods, and "food tourism."

This latest project - he calls it the Keystone Center, based at Drexel University, where he is on the adjunct faculty - follows the classic Weaver modus operandi: Bite off more than is comfortable to chew. Bemoan the crushing weight of it all. (He maintains, for example, an ancient Indian corn variety - singularly, now - that even tribal elders rely on him to provide: "I'm the keeper. But I don't want the burden; I'm not Noah!") Thrive on the ensuing chaos.