The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a delicious food future for all of us

Author Biography

Adam Alexander’s first book, The Seed Detective, told the heritage stories of our everyday veg heroes. It was chosen as one of Radio 4’s The Food Programme’s Books of the Year by Dan Saladino and shortlisted for the Garden Media Guild’s Garden Book of the Year. Adam is a consummate storyteller, thanks to forty years as an award-winning film and television producer, but his true passion is collecting rare, endangered and, above all, delicious vegetables from around the world. He lectures widely on his work discovering and conserving rare, endangered garden crops and is a board member of the national charity Garden Organic. His knowledge and expertise on growing out vegetables for seed is highly valued by the Heritage Seed Library, for which he is a seed guardian. Adam shares seeds with other growers and gene banks in the USA, Canada and the EU, and he is currently growing out seeds of heritage Syrian vegetables to be returned to the Middle East as part of a programme to revive traditional horticulture. He has appeared on Gardeners’ World, the Great British Food Revival, CNN’s Going Green and Radio New Zealand. Find out more: TheSeedDetective.co.uk / Twitter @vegoutwithadam / Insta @theseeddetective. Rekha Mistry is a writer and kitchen gardener, named by Country Living Magazine as one to watch in 2021. After reaching the quarterfinal of the BBC’s Big Allotment Challenge in 2015 and achieving the RHS Diploma in Horticulture a year later, she is now a regular columnist for BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine and works as a gardener at the historic Inner Temple Garden. Her North London allotment appeared on Gardeners’ World (BBC) and is showcased on her Instagram account, @Rekha.garden.kitchen, which has almost 80k followers.