Dr Wiola Rebecka:
War ruptures time. For survivors, there is often a sharp “before” and “after” that fractures their life narrative. Seeds—carrying the genetic memory of plants from before the destruction—hold an unbroken link to that earlier world. Tending to them can help restore a sense of continuity and belonging. In caring for seeds, survivors are not only protecting a plant species; they are safeguarding the same life forms that their parents or grandparents once sowed. This re-establishes a sense of historical rootedness that trauma so often severs. Caring for seeds from war zones can become a surprisingly powerful form of trauma healing because seeds are more than biological material—they are carriers of memory, continuity, and possibility. In contexts of war, where destruction often extends to landscapes, agriculture, and cultural heritage, the act of preserving seeds becomes a counter-narrative to violence: a gesture of survival, resistance, and hope.
In Guatemala’s highlands during the brutality of civil war, nineteen-year-old Aniceta—an Indigenous Mayan Achi midwife—became a living testament to resistance. When her village fell silent and she fled into the mountains, she buried amaranth seeds wrapped in cloth, carrying them as silent heirs of home and heritage. In the depths of fear and displacement, these seeds were more than emergency rations—they were a fragile thread connecting her to ancestral land, knowledge, and identity. As she nurtured the seeds, they sprouted life amid the wilderness—and with them, her community began to heal. Tending those seedlings signified not only survival, but the persistence of cultural roots under siege.
In the archipelago of Guinea-Bissau, within the intricate cultural web of the Bijagó people, women carry a sacred responsibility: to sustain the biodiversity that feeds their communities and anchors their identity. Their work is not loud or public; it is quiet, deliberate, and constant. In the humid rhythm of seasonal rains and shifting cultivation cycles, these women move through the fields and gardens with practiced hands—selecting the strongest seeds of cherry tomatoes, okra, cucumber, eggplant, corn, rice, yam, lime, and more. Each seed chosen is a promise to the future, each gesture a repetition of movements handed down for generations.
Horticulturist Anjuleta Gomes describes the process with a calm precision that reveals its deep cultural roots. Once dried in the sun, the seeds are placed into dry jars. “You put some ash on it, to keep the bugs away, and close it well,” she explains, as if passing on an ancient spell. This is not modern agribusiness. It is survival entwined with care, rooted in an ancestral knowledge of nature’s own languages. In two communal adobe barns, they now safeguard fifteen varieties of rice—trusted breeds that have travelled, season after season, from the hands of one generation of women to the next.
To an outsider, it might look like agriculture. But in truth, it is far more than that. It is a living act of resistance against the forces that would erase diversity—monoculture farming, corporate control of seeds, climate change, and land dispossession. It is the preservation of taste, story, and ritual. Each jar and barn is a repository of more than food: it holds the memory of harvest songs, planting festivals, and the intimate knowledge of which grain thrives in dry years and which in wet. In safeguarding these seeds, the women are safeguarding their people’s autonomy and resilience.
In a world where conflict, environmental degradation, and economic pressure can sever a community from its roots, the work of the Bijagó women ensures that heritage does not vanish. The seeds they guard are not relics to be locked away; they are alive, ready to re-sprout when seasons of crisis ease. In their care lies the quiet certainty that, however disrupted life may become, the fields will one day green again—and with them, the songs, the flavors, and the stories of the people who endured.
Trauma fractures stories. After overwhelming experiences, we cannot remember in linear form; memory is shattered—that is neurophysiology. War transforms time into severed segments of “before” and “after,” making the past feel unreachable. Seeds—remarkably—carry embedded stories. When we begin to approach the healing of our war-traumatized past, we are making a deliberate attempt to rebuild the shattered materials of the mind. We can patch the torn places, even embroider new patterns over the holes, yet trauma always changes the fabric forever. Returning to the roots of our identity—our food, our traditions, our genuine networks of social support—is like sowing seeds in a field for a future harvest. Caring for actual seeds becomes a living metaphor for this process: the slow, patient work of restoring our connection to the roots that existed before the war, to the life and continuity that violence once tried to sever.
In trauma theory and cultural memory studies, memory is understood not as a purely cognitive process, but as something embodied—carried in gestures, in the senses, and in objects that hold emotional, tactile, and historical resonance (The New Yorker; Women Writers, Women’s Books; Medium; ResearchGate). Unlike formal testimony or archival documents, seeds contain both genealogical information and ancestral memory. They are fragments of the “before,” encoded not in words but in living matter. To hold a seed is to hold a remnant of the world as it once was; to plant it is to enact an intimate form of remembrance. As it germinates and grows, it becomes a living archive—rooted in the past, alive in the present, and carrying the possibility of a future.
Tending seeds can be a tangible act of reclaiming agency. Amid chaos, soil under the fingernails and sprouts breaking through earth offer proof that growth—even in tiny form—continues. Roots take hold. Narrative ruptures begin to mend as continuity is physically embedded and witnessed. The life cycle of a seed—dormant, buried, sprouting, blooming—is a powerful mirror of trauma recovery. What lies dormant has the potential to emerge. What appears broken can regrow. Survivors working with seeds participate in a metaphor brought to life: healing may be slow, but it is alive. The life cycle begins in stillness. A seed lies dormant, hidden in the dark, holding within itself an entire blueprint for life. To the untrained eye, it appears inert, even lifeless. Yet within its sealed shell, unseen processes are quietly preparing for the moment when conditions will allow it to awaken. This is how trauma recovery often begins—not with dramatic transformation, but in the deep interior, where something small and essential waits for safety, warmth, and nourishment. Survivors, like seeds, carry their potential for renewal even when they feel buried under the weight of loss.
When the seed is finally placed into soil, it is covered over again—an act that seems, paradoxically, like another burial. But under the darkness, a miracle begins. The outer shell softens; roots reach downward to anchor themselves; a fragile stem pushes upward toward light it cannot yet see. In the same way, survivors must often return to those dark, buried places, trusting that the work done there will one day break the surface. Sprouting is not instant. It demands patience, protection, and the quiet faith that something unseen is growing. When the first green shoot appears, it is both a sign of resilience and a call for continued care. Just as plants need consistent water, light, and space to grow strong, survivors need the steady presence of supportive people, healing rituals, and the rhythms of daily life to rebuild their strength. And then, in its own season, the plant blooms. It is no longer what it was before—it has transformed entirely—but it carries within every leaf and petal the memory of the seed it once was. Survivors, too, may emerge changed by their journey, marked by what they have endured, yet deeply alive.
In working with seeds—planting, tending, harvesting—they embody this truth: healing may be slow, but it is alive, unfolding in its own time, rooted in the quiet persistence of life itself. Trauma, especially from war, often leaves people feeling powerless and unable to influence their environment. Cultivating seeds, even in small containers, offers tangible proof that one can still create, protect, and shape life. This is a direct antidote to the helplessness trauma imposes. It is a quiet form of reclaiming control over the future. Gardening, touching soil, watering, and observing growth can engage the body’s sensory pathways in calming ways. These actions activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing hyperarousal and anxiety. In trauma therapy, such activities are sometimes described as grounding practices: they anchor a person in the here and now while gently stimulating hope.
War strips people of their sense of agency. Homes vanish, landscapes are scarred, and choices—once abundant—are reduced to survival alone. In the aftermath, many survivors describe feeling suspended in someone else’s world, powerless to shape their own. It is in this context that the simple act of cultivating seeds can become radical. Even in the smallest container—a cracked pot on a balcony, a recycled tin on a windowsill—planting a seed is a declaration: I can still create. I can still protect. I can still shape life. Every decision—where to place the pot, how much water to give, when to transplant—becomes a quiet act of sovereignty. The helplessness that war carves into the body begins to soften in the presence of something that responds to your care.
The process itself works on the nervous system in ways science now recognizes. Pushing fingers into soil, feeling its cool texture, watching water seep into dark earth—these sensations travel through the body, bypassing the constant hum of vigilance that trauma leaves behind. The slow, rhythmic motions of gardening signal safety to the brain, activating the parasympathetic nervous system and easing hyperarousal. In trauma therapy, this is called grounding: returning to the body, to the present moment, to the knowledge that right now you are safe enough to plant and watch something grow. The seedlings become more than plants; they are proof that life can take root again. In their fragile green stems, there is a reflection of the survivor’s own journey—still tender, still needing care, yet undeniably alive.
Seeds and plants ask for no stories. They do not require that you put words to the unspeakable. In their presence, survivors can set down the burden of explaining, of translating their grief into something others can understand. Instead, they can simply act—turning soil, watering roots, pressing a seed into the earth with the gentlest of touches. In this way, the care given to something living becomes a quiet form of testimony, spoken not in sentences but in green leaves and new shoots. It says: I am still here. Life is still possible. For many, this silent witnessing is easier than facing the direct retelling of their trauma. The seed becomes a confidant that never interrupts, never questions, never recoils. In tending to it, survivors are also tending to the unspoken parts of themselves.
When this care happens collectively—in a seed bank, a community garden, or a cultural preservation project—the act grows beyond the personal. These spaces become meeting grounds where people from the same war-torn homeland exchange seeds like fragments of memory. A handful of beans might carry the taste of a lost childhood; a packet of wheat might recall the fields where a family once worked together. In passing seeds from hand to hand, stories sometimes emerge—not because they are demanded, but because the space feels safe enough for them to surface. Elders teach the younger generation not just how to plant, but where these seeds came from, how they survived the war, and why they matter. The garden becomes a living archive, where memory is rooted in soil, where the past and the future grow side by side. And in that shared work, a quiet solidarity forms: the knowledge that while much has been destroyed, some things—seeds, memories, resilience—can still be saved and shared.
War often goes hand in hand with erasure—of culture, of language, of biodiversity. Many seeds from war zones are also indigenous varieties threatened by globalization or monoculture agriculture. Preserving them resists both military and corporate forms of destruction. It asserts that the culture and ecology of a people will not be erased. The life cycle of a seed—dormancy, germination, growth—mirrors the long, non-linear path of healing. Just as seeds may lie dormant for years before conditions allow them to sprout, survivors’ capacity for joy, trust, and connection may take years to re-emerge. Working with seeds helps embody the understanding that life after devastation is possible, even if it is slow.
Bosnia greeted me with that peculiar mixture of beauty and heaviness that belongs only to post-war landscapes. The mountains stood like witnesses, their silence holding the memory of everything they had seen. Here, the air carries a strange duality—sweetness and bitterness, like honey and blood mixed together. It is a phrase I had heard Bosnian women use to describe their homeland: “This place is made of honey and blood.” Honey for the beauty, the hospitality, the warmth of its people; blood for the wars, the betrayals, the violence that seeped into the soil. I came to Bosnia to speak, to listen, and to learn from women whose lives and work are bound to the slow, persistent labour of healing after war. It was during this time that I met Melissa Potter—an artist and cultural activist from Columbia University whose work struck me as both radically simple and deeply transformative.
Melissa’s story began not in the Balkans but with her grandmother, a woman whose life was shaped by her own migrations, gardens, and careful acts of preservation. Following in her grandmother’s footsteps, Melissa did something both poetic and political: she began to collect seeds. At first, these were seeds from local women’s gardens in the Balkans—small parcels of life exchanged with quiet pride, each holding centuries of adaptation to soil, climate, and culture. But the seeds were never just about plants. They were about women’s knowledge, autonomy, and identity. In Bosnia, where so much cultural heritage was deliberately destroyed during the war, Melissa understood that seeds could be both memory and resistance. Each seed carried a story—of a mother teaching her daughter how to plant, of a grandmother recalling the taste of a pre-war harvest, of rituals that turned food into a language of belonging. In a region where transgenerational trauma runs deep, where the silence around pain can be as inherited as the pain itself, these seeds became living metaphors for healing.
Here, the metaphor of honey and blood took on new meaning for me. Seeds are the honey—the sweetness of continuity, the quiet gift passed down from hand to hand, rooted in care and hope. But to reach that honey, one must pass through the blood—the memory of fields where crops once grew now marked by graves, the absence of those who should have been there to pass the seeds on. In every act of planting in Bosnia, there is both joy and mourning, sweetness and grief entwined.
What moved me most was the way Melissa’s project expanded outward without losing its intimacy. From gardens in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia, her work grew into the Feminist Bank of Seeds, an international network of women sharing their local plant heritage. The project reached the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—the world’s most secure seed bank in the Arctic—ensuring that these women’s contributions would survive not only the passage of time but even potential global catastrophe.
In Svalbard, far from the mountains and rivers of the Balkans, the seeds rest in deep cold, awaiting a future in which they might once again touch the soil. The image feels almost mythic: the honey of women’s gardens preserved in a vault, safe from the violence of war, drought, or greed. And yet, I know that the true strength of this work is not in the vault itself, but in the women who keep planting, season after season, refusing to let the blood be the final word.
I could not help but see the parallels between this work and the slow, patient labour of trauma recovery. Seeds are small, fragile things, easily overlooked. Healing is like that too—it begins in quiet acts, often invisible to those who are looking only for grand gestures. But given time, care, and the right conditions, both seeds and people find ways to root again. In our conversations, Melissa spoke not only about preservation but about connection. The seeds were never meant to be locked away as relics of a vanished past; they were meant to travel, to be planted, to continue feeding and healing communities. In that, her work defied the extractive logic that too often defines international projects in post-conflict regions. She was not coming to “help” in the colonial sense of the word; she was coming to exchange, to learn, to grow alongside the women she met. Watching her work, I realised that the Feminist Bank of Seeds is not only about biodiversity—it is about bio-memory. It acknowledges that women’s knowledge is as vital to survival as the seeds themselves. It honours the fact that in many war-torn societies, women are the custodians of both land and culture, and that their role in sustaining life is not symbolic but deeply practical.
Leaving Bosnia, I carried with me not just the stories of the women I met, but also a deeper understanding of what healing can look like when it refuses to be rushed. Seeds teach patience. They teach faith in futures we may not live to see. And perhaps most importantly, they teach us that even after devastation, life can return—different, yes, but still vibrant, still rooted in what came before. Melissa’s work reminded me that to heal transgenerational trauma, we must do more than tend to the wounds; we must also tend to the roots. In Bosnia, those roots run deep, and in the hands of women like her, they are being cared for—one seed, one story, one shared act of preservation at a time. Here, the honey and blood will always remain—neither can be erased. But perhaps, in the gardens of women, the balance can shift, and the sweetness can take root again.
About the author:
Dr Wiola Rebecka is a psychologist and researcher based in NYC. She is the author of the book “Rape :a history of shame diary of the survivors”.