LEAVING AN Heirloom Legacy

SOME THINK HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES and fruits are plants with traits frozen in time, so that the seeds you plant in your garden produce the same plants as those grown in your grandmother’s garden. “Impossible!” says Frank Morton, co-founder with his wife, Karen Morton, of Wild Garden Seed in Philomath, Oregon.

Morton (pictured above) works to maintain and strengthen the genetic stock of heirloom cultivars. To him, the idea of the frozen-in-time heirloom is a myth, unless you’ve been storing lettuce seeds in the basement from your great-grandmother. Even then, after the seeds have germinated, the plant population will adapt to its new locale.

Insects, plants, and pathogens are locked in an endless struggle of adaptation, Morton says. Plants create defenses to ward off threats from pathogens and insects, and