#bill best

[hjmarseille]

Men of No 2 Squadron, Special Boat Service reading The Sunday Post, February 1945. (Collection of Bill Best/Courtesy of the Commando Veterans Association)

Photo and caption featured in Scotland on the Frontline: A Photo History of Scottish Forces 1939-45 by Chris Brown

[loyaljonesappalachiancenter-blog]

Over the summer, our student workers planted heirloom tomato seeds from Bill Best’s seed savers! It was an educational experience for them; one of which had never planted anything before! 

[theoxfordamerican]

Issue 84: King of the Bean People by Courtney Balestier

Bill Best, who founded the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, saves seeds—not in the way that people save stamps or coins, but in the way that people save endangered species, or possessions from a fire. He grows and stores about 700 varieties of beans on his farm in Berea, Kentucky, where he lives with Irmgard, his wife of fifty-one years, in a midcentury ranch house she designed, with stone chimneys he built. Some of his seeds are more than 150 years old—one goes back to the American Revolution. For the most part, they still grow as they always have. Not all of them grow on his land; many come from exchanges with other savers. Through his nonprofit, he sells them to enthusiasts, newcomers or experienced gardeners or canners, most of whom want to taste once more the meals their mothers prepared, or to access some other memory from childhood, a memory that holds in it all the immensity of the everyday. In this transaction, Best is something like the madeleine peddler of Appalachia. Read more...

Photo by Aaron Cohen