South Dakotan Michael Melius sells jewelry you plant
– -Seed Beads’ loaded with seeds of increasingly rare native
grasses and wildflowers and strung on scraps of linen thread. It
was the simplest packaging Melius could think of. “I had tried to
sell seed mixes in packets with little success, I think, because
that packaging implies they’re for people who are serious about
growing native plants,” he says. “Enclosed in balls of dirt,
they’re for anybody.” The irony is that buyers then find they have
a serious responsibility on their hands. “Plants like leadplant and
groundplum seem to disappear under traditional livestock grazing
regimes, while echinacea and breadroot are threatened by people
digging the roots,” Melius says. He began his project as “Prairie
Bombs,” an Earth Day fund-raising idea that boomed when he offered
it commercially in April 1996. His brochure invited purchasers to
“paint the land, then watch the sky make the colors run.” Melius
says Prairie Bombs now are history. “I never liked the name because
of its killer connotations,” he says, adding that there were
uncanny similarities between himself and Ted Kaczynski, the alleged
“Unabomber.” “There I was, this manifesto-writing guy with unruly
hair, carefully crafting my “bombs’ in a low-tech shack …”
Seed Beads are available only in South Dakota.
For more information, contact Windrose Seeds, HCR 89, Box 275,
Hermosa, SD 57744 (605/255-4766).
* Michael
Moreland
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wear what you sow.
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