True charm
Professor Kuo Hwa-jen of the Department of Agronomy at National Taiwan University, who has known the Liangs for over a decade, opines that the Thousand Fields Seed Museum makes its social contribution by providing a fun place where people can go to see seeds on display and get a hands-on feel for what they’re like. But, says Kuo, the museum cannot and should not be seen as a seed bank capable of rescuing plant species from extinction, and it would be quite unreasonable to expect a pair of amateur collectors to take on such a burdensome task.
As a professor of seed science, Kuo has seen just about every sort of seed in existence, but he’d never come across the brilliant blue seeds of the traveler’s palm (Ravenala madagascariensis) until he visited the Thousand Fields Seed Museum.
In addition to its focus on the science of seeds, Thousand Fields Museum also doubles as an art museum. One of the display rooms is devoted solely to artworks made from seeds. There’s a big spider, for example, whose head is made of the seeds of the balloon plant (Cardiospermum halicacabum), the body from the seeds of the Chinese soapberry (Sapindus mukorossii), legs from the seeds of the canna plant (Canna indica) and the golden rain tree (Koelreuteria henryi), and tail from the seeds of the rusty-leaf mucuna (Mucuna macrocarpa).
The seeds of the oil palm (Elaeis quineensis), meanwhile, come with holes in the surface that make them look eerily similar to the contorted visage in The Scream, the famous work by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. And seeds of the wood gossip caesalpinia (Caesalpinia crista) have been tweaked with a few brushstrokes to make a decent likeness of the Po Yo (“grandma’s melancholy”) birds in the noted Evening Call series of paintings by deceased artist and anthropologist Max Liu.
On the day we visited the museum, a pair of visitors from Shanghai named Gu Yiling and Luo Chenyun had made a special trip there to see the collection. Still in their 20s, the two were nevertheless seasoned travelers. Gu said she had never heard of any place in Shanghai or anywhere else in mainland China dedicated to the collection and display of plant seeds. “We usually just casually look at things like flowers, trees, leaves, and whatnot. Few people go and study what the seeds look like.”
Luo was interested in the museum’s ornamental objects made from plant seeds, especially the necklaces, and said such things are rare on the mainland.
Gu marveled at the good luck of people in Tainan, who can drop in at the Thousand Fields Seed Museum whenever they feel like it. Luo said that the museum has a distinctly simple and unadorned feel about it.
The sight of dozens of sacks of seeds hanging from the ceiling joists is rather disconcerting at first, but it certainly makes a lasting impression on visitors.