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Throughout The Overstory, seeds represent hope for future life and new growth, as well as resiliency and adaptation in the face of disaster.
Seeds feature prominently in several characters’ storylines. The book begins with the origin of the Hoel chestnut tree, a magnificent tree that manages to escape the American chestnut blight (at least for a time) all because Jørgen Hoel accidentally brings six chestnuts with him from New York to Iowa and plants them. Over a century later, Neelay Mehta’s father compares their early computer and coding work to a tiny seed producing an enormous banyan fig tree, and this image of the potential for endless branching growth sticks with Neelay for the rest of his life. Most notably, Patricia Westerford starts a seed vault, traveling the world and gathering seeds to keep in her subzero bunker in the hopes of preserving dying species for the future. Patricia is notably pessimistic about the future of humanity, but she has total faith in the patience of trees and in a seed’s ability to survive and thrive. In all of these instances, the act of gathering or planting seeds (whether real or imagined) is a way for characters to remain hopeful and envision the future as something that is beautiful and limitless in its potential, like a tree’s ever-growing branches.
Seeds are not only full of potential but also resilient to various stresses and traumas—and some even require such experiences to properly germinate. As the narrative notes in several places, some seeds require fire to open, some need to be frozen or digested, and some can survive for thousands of years and still germinate. This represents life’s ability to adapt even to man-made catastrophes like worldwide deforestation. The Overstory encourages readers to take comfort in the fact that although humanity might not survive to see the future of seeds like those in Patricia’s vault, life itself—as symbolized by those seeds—will always continue.
Seeds Quotes in The Overstory
The The Overstory quotes below all refer to the symbol of Seeds. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 2: Trunk
Quotes
"I want to start a seed bank. There are half as many trees in the world as there were before we came down out of them. […] Tens of thousands of trees we know nothing about. Species we've barely classified. Like burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy, and hall of records, all at once."
"You want to start an ark."
She smiles at the word, but shrugs. It's as good as any. "I want to start an ark."
"Where you can keep . . ." The strangeness of the idea gets him. A vault to store a few hundred million years of tinkering. Hand on the car door, he fixes on something high up in a cedar. "What . . . would you do with them? When would they ever…?"
"Den, I don't know. But a seed can lie dormant for thousands of years."
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Part 3: Crown
Quotes
One passage keeps springing back, every time fear or scientific rigor makes her prune it. Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
[…]
As soon as she seals the carton with packing tape, she cracks it open again. The last line of the last chapter is still wrong. She looks at what she has, although the sentence has long since burned itself into permanent memory. With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.
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Part 4: Seeds
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There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they'll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
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Get the entire The Overstory LitChart as a printable PDF.
Seeds Symbol Timeline in The Overstory
The timeline below shows where the symbol Seeds appears in The Overstory. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1: Roots—Neelay Mehta
...look away. Babul tells him that if such a tree could come from a tiny seed the size of Neelay’s fingertip, then they, too, can fit anything into their new machine.
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Part 1: Roots—Patricia Westerford
As a child in 1950, Patricia Westerford creates tiny creatures out of seeds, sticks, and leaves to play with. She rarely speaks, and for years her parents are...
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...the bulk of a tree comes from, such that it can grow from a tiny seed to something so huge. They weigh a tub of soil, weigh a small beechnut tree,...
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Part 2: Trunk
...least preserve a few specimens of all the trees that will soon be gone: a seed vault. Dennis is intrigued by the idea. Patricia doesn’t have a plan for what the...
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...kit, and how all the trees that now surround them came only from the banyan seed the size of his fingertip, as Babul had told him years before. Babul thanks his...
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...are doing while Adam, Nick, and Olivia are in custody. Patricia gives talks about the seed vault she is starting, Neelay sends memos about adding even more complexity and beauty to...
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...the streets of town until he is struck in the head by a falling eucalyptus seed pod. He examines the strange object and then looks up at the tree itself, asking...
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...Mulberry’s garage, building explosives and finalizing their plans. They hope to at least plant a seed with their actions—“the kind that needs fire to open.”
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Part 3: Crown
...ever. She regularly travels around the country giving talks and asking for funding for her seed vault. She uses every tactic she can to convince her audiences that humanity’s current way...
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...the vault. He hasn’t been quite convinced by Patricia’s project yet. She tells him about seeds that have germinated after thousands of years in the frost, but she knows that his...
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...revises her final sentence. The book was going to end on her hope that her seed vault would allow future people to plant the seeds someday. Now she adds: “If not,...
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Ray and Dorothy now have a new daily game: Dorothy brings in various leaves, seeds, and twigs from trees, and then together (with Dorothy reading aloud) they identify the trees...
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Part 4: Seeds
...has lived a very rich live after all. At the same time, he feels the “seed” of a tumor growing in his side. Meanwhile Neelay works on his new project, with...
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Douglas returns to the audio lectures, as the professor describes seeds that only open when exposed to fire and then returns to her theme of the...
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...during the time of his sentence. Adam checks in with an official and notices a seed stuck to his own shoulder. Somehow it found its way there, though he has only...
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...of the signals constantly being passed between everything green that lives. They tell her about seeds and how some seeds need fire, or ice, or to be smashed open before they...
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