The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL), founded in 2014 in the West Bank village of Battir, began as an attempt to recover ancient Palestinian seeds — and their stories — in order to get them back into people’s hands and hearts. PHSL is an interactive art and agriculture project that also aims to start conversations, exchange knowledge, and share the stories of food and farming that have been buried away, waiting to sprout like seeds. It is also a living archive of stories of people and plants, and it aims to inspire a new world using the seed as a dissident traveling across borders and checkpoints to defy violence and oppression while reclaiming life and presence.
Part of the Fertile Crescent, Palestine is one of the world’s centers of crop diversity, particularly for wheat and barley (but also chickpeas, lentils, fava beans, flax, oats, and other crops). This biodiversity, which has sustained our people for millennia, is threatened by policies that target farmers and force them to give up not only their lands but also their heirloom seeds through compelling them to adopt new varieties that don't “know the soil”.
At PHSL, we believe that we are part of a global tapestry of people working together to save important crop varieties and to engage with the land as our sacred home and a place where we can acknowledge death and pain while designing beautiful new futures. Our heirloom seeds tell us stories, connect us to our ancestral roots, nourish our bodies and our souls, remind us of special meals our families once shared, and help us write new stories and imagine new possibilities for the generations to come. Our seeds carry our dreams of the past and our hopes for the future.
At the heart of our mission is our work with Palestinian farmers still tending our land and stewarding our seeds in the soil where they belong. While our work of conserving seeds ex situ (“out of place”) is important, especially given the ongoing threats to farmers and all people in Palestine, the work of supporting farmers who are still maintaining seeds in situ (“in place”) despite the dangers, is fundamental. They are the reason the Seed Library even exists — and as long as these ahl al thara (“people of the soil”) continue their vital work, we will be there to support them.
PHSL is an interactive art and agriculture project that also aims to start conversations, exchange knowledge, and share the stories of food and farming that have been buried away, waiting to sprout like seeds.
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