The satisfaction of seed catalogs
Plus: links to said catalogs!
Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember shopping via catalogs long before I ever shopped online. Maybe it’s because it seems wrong to browse for something so physically grounded as plants and seeds on the internet. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Whatever it is, I feel a certain way about flipping through a snail-mailed seed catalog that is just not replicated by looking at products on the company’s website. Opening up endless new tabs for seeds I’m interested in is somehow not the same as dog-earing a page with my fingers or circling the item with a pen.
Sure, I’ll gladly go to the internet to find more information about a given item than they can comfortably print in the pages of a catalog, like ideal germination temperatures and advice for when to start seeds indoors. I’m not naive enough to pretend to ignore the utility of the vast quantities of information that can fit on the internet. And once I’ve done my research and am ready to place my order, I’ll happily do it online. But it’s not where I want to start. I want to start by sitting down at my dining table or in my living room armchair with a mug of lemon ginger tea and flipping through physical pages. I want to let my eyes rest on the beautiful photographs and drawings, holding a pen in one hand, poised to circle the things that make me go, “ooh!”
At the risk of sounding like I’m saying “gee, weren’t things better in previous decades?” which quickly runs downhill to a very MAGA mentality, let me be clear: I do not eschew the forward march of progress, technological or social. I simply want to give my eyes and brain a break from the screen sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time. After hours of staring at a screen, my brain starts to feel like it’s been rubbed the wrong way. The immediate transition of work and so much of life to our internet-connected devices with the onset of the pandemic in 2020 left me feeling as though my activities were two-dimensional for a few years. I appreciated the ability to keep my job and to keep in touch with my loved ones when it wasn’t safe to do so in person, but nevertheless, something important was lost. This, and the ensuing depression, is what initially drove me to become a gardener. So is it any wonder I prefer a physical seed catalog to an online one?
I guess the gist of my reflection is: two things can be true at the same time.
Here are some seed catalogs I’m excited to flip through in January:
