Sunday Visit: Grand Prismatic Seed

Guy Banner and James Young are the co-owners and farmers of Grand Prismatic Seed, a small seed farm located in Northern Utah. They are committed to growing high-quality open-pollinated seeds that can withstand the stresses associated with high desert crop production. They specialize in growing seeds for dye plants and plants native to their bioregion, and also offer a curated list of seeds for their favorite cut flowers, vegetables, and herbs. All of their offerings are grown using organic methods.

We are so excited to feature you and your incredible seeds and farm. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started? What is the origin story of Grand Prismatic Seed?

Thank you so much for having us, Cara! We really appreciate the work Botanical Colors does in fostering connections within the natural dye community, and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to share a bit about Grand Prismatic Seed with your readers.

Guy and I have always been passionate about plants and we wanted to find a way to share that love with others. We both had backgrounds in seed farming before we started Grand Prismatic Seed, me at Wild Garden Seed and Guy with a USDA plant material center in Oregon that focused on growing native plants. When we moved back home to Utah from Oregon to be closer to family, we decided it was a great time to start something of our own.

When brainstorming what we wanted our future seed farm to look like, I was most interested in curating a thoughtful lineup of dye seeds to help fellow fiber enthusiasts with their dye gardens. I had seen lots of gaps in what was available to dyers at the time, and wanted to be able to provide more support around dye plant cultivation. Guy, with his background in habitat restoration and water-wise gardening, was interested in cultivating native species and less-known waterwise plants. Those are still the two main pillars of GPS, but we also grow plants for our favorite cut flowers, herbs, and vegetables too.

We were also drawn to the opportunity to make plant selections in an area with fewer seed growers and plant breeders, particularly as climate change continues to make growing conditions more unpredictable. Having adaptable seeds selected under diverse environmental pressures will be increasingly important, and that’s something we’re excited to contribute to.

James, you are a natural dye aficionado, and have a personal familial connection to the craft, can you let us know about the “Aha!” moment you had, that gave you the bug?

Growing up near the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, I loved hiking with friends and discovering the beauty of the plants that surrounded me. After my grandma and sister taught me to knit while I was in high school, my “aha” moment came when I learned I could preserve the beauty from my local landscapes onto yarn through the natural dye process. The idea of holding onto the essence of a place, a plant, or a fleeting moment in time, and then transforming it further through knitting, felt nothing short of magical. It wasn’t until I moved to Oregon years later that dyeing went from an occasional hobby to a sustained practice.

My sister Erin remains a major source of inspiration in my fiber arts practice. Since teaching me to knit over twenty years ago, she has become an exceptional quilter, and now she’s guiding me as I learn to quilt and expand my sewing skills. We both prefer quiet moments of creativity, so crafting alongside her is always something I look forward to.

Guy, you have an extensive background in horticulture and botany, you two are seriously a plant power couple, tell us a little bit about how your work manifests on your farm.

Wow, thank you! There’s so much to learn and explore in the world through the lens of plants, and it’s truly rewarding to share that with others through the work we do. I try to approach the world as holistically as possible, drawing from the knowledge, experiences, and connections I’ve gained along the way. Having worked across various disciplines involving plants including ecology, agriculture, horticulture, and ethnobotany, I’ve been able to see how different ways of thinking about plants overlap and diverge, which has only deepened my appreciation for their multi-faceted natures.

Through this journey, I’ve brought plants into Grand Prismatic Seed that I’ve come to love in different settings. For example, Lindley’s clarkia is a wildflower I encountered during field botany monitoring work in the Pacific Northwest. Later on I worked closely with it in ecological restoration, collecting seed for it, doing field production of seed, and applying it in habitat restoration projects. After spending time with it in the field, it was nice to introduce it to our farm (our native leaf-cutter bees are happy about it too! They love using the petals for nesting material).

Through my work at a Botanical Garden’s Water Conservation Garden, with my colleagues, I explore and share with the community a huge diversity of plants from around the world as well as native species. I bring the inspiration and experiences I gain from working with these plants and people to our efforts at Grand Prismatic Seed. Just as importantly, I bring the practical, hands-on skills, and calluses 🙂 that come with the day-to-day, season-to-season work of running a seed farm and business.

You mention that your seeds are open-pollinated, can you explain why this is so important to our readers?

We believe a cornerstone of seed sovereignty is the ability of farmers and gardeners to save their own seed and adapt varieties to meet the needs of their environment and community. Because of this belief, we grow patent-free open-pollinated varieties that will produce true-to-type seeds when saved by their new stewards. Open pollinated plants are allowed to naturally pollinate within their variety, while hybrids are formed by controlling the pollination of two inbred lines to create a new uniform variety with specific attributes. If you save seeds from hybrid parents, it’s unlikely that their progeny will have the traits you had originally desired, because of this, gardeners and farmers must return to the hybrid growers year after year to re-purchase their seeds.

When we send out thank you cards with seed orders, we always encourage our customers to save their own seeds so they can avoid having to buy them in the future. Of course, we’re always here if they need us!

You grow in a few different locations? Can you tell us about them?

One of the challenges of seed farming is preventing cross-pollination between different varieties of the same species. For example, when growing multiple varieties of dyer’s coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), we need to ensure each variety is far enough apart so that pollinators don’t visit both. To achieve this, multiple isolation locations are needed.

Our high-maintenance plants, those whose seeds drop as soon as they’re ripe, are often planted in our front and back yard to make sure we collect some seeds (like exploding lupine and native poppies) before they have scattered.

We primarily grow at two locations in the Salt Lake Valley: the Mobile Moon Co-op and Top Crops Farm. The Mobile Moon Co-op is a femme & queer collective dedicated to community, education, empowerment, and botanical stewardship. We’ve been growing crops there since 2020 and love sharing space with them and the uplifting work they do in Salt Lake City.

Top Crops is a vegetable farm run by our friends Amanda Theobald and Elliott Musgrove. They’re exceptional vegetable farmers, and it’s been a joy farming alongside them. We’re not sure we could survive the summer heat without Amanda nearby, always ready to rescue us with popsicles.

This past year, James’ sister in Brigham City, Utah, let us take over a large portion of her garden to host an isolation plot of ‘chijimiba’ Japanese indigo. This allowed us to grow three varieties of Japanese indigo last season without the risk of cross-pollination.

Do you have any tips or tricks for the newbie gardener?

Definitely! We actually just made a blog post entitled Sow the Spectrum: Starting a Dye Garden from Seed. It has LOTS of information packed into it. The following excerpt from the blog is probably one of our favorite tips for those starting their first garden, the sentiment also applies to people who are dipping their figurative toes into their first dye pot:

“Cultivating a positive and experimental mindset will be your greatest asset. Embrace the journey of trial and error with enthusiasm; seed starting involves so many variables, and many of them are not black and white. Even with decades of experience starting seeds, we still encounter new challenges each year. Let every success and setback shape your approach to the next growing season. Enjoy the learning process!”

If you are someone who needs results to be perfect on your first try, natural dyeing and gardening may prove to be a VERY stressful hobby.

Aside from the farm? What makes you tick? Any other passions that feed into this work for you?

When we get a chance to step away from the busyness of farming, we love to explore public lands across Utah and other Western states. Spending time in unique plant communities and the ecosystems that support them informs the types of plants we want to grow, helps us see their relationships with one another, and influences the way we want to approach the world around us. Lying quietly in a sandstone basin, surrounded by cacti and desert oak is our version of “touching grass”, and always refreshes us.

If you both were a plant, what would you be?

James: What a fun question! Right now, I think I’d be sand dock (Rumex hymenosepalus), also known as canaigre, desert rhubarb, or tanner’s dock. They’re such quirky little guys, and I’d be honored to be one. I tend to wilt in the heat of summer, so I admire how sand dock goes dormant when temperatures soar, storing their energy in chunky, whimsical tubers deep in cool sand, shielded from the desert sun. I’m also enamored by how the roots dye fabric in colors that reflect the landscape where they thrive. The quilt I’m holding in the picture above was dyed sky blue with Japanese indigo, along with three earthy shades from sand dock tubers. The tan color reminds me of yellow sandstone and dried native bunchgrasses, the warm reddish-brown mirrors the red rock, and the deep gray-brown looks just like desert varnish on the cliffs.

Guy: This is tough for me, but if I had to choose one for now, it would be globemallow (small leaf globemallow is pictured below). This group of western wildflowers have an incredible ability to blanket landscapes after fires or wet winters, thrive in craggy rock outcroppings or hold their own with competitive meadow grasses. Some of my favorite species hold onto their grey-green leaves through the winter, I love the endurance of evergreen foliage. The bright flowers seem to glow when lit by the low angle of the sun. Flowers amongst the species range from soft oranges to shades of peach, coral, white, and pink, and they attract a wide variety of pollinators with their open, cup-shaped blossoms full of nectar and pollen. Globemallows even have a native bee that specializes in their pollination (Diadasia diminuta, the globemallow bee).

I deeply admire the resilience, beauty, and bounty of these plants that thrive in such harsh environments, and I aspire to embody their grace and strength. I grew up with some of these beauties in my front yard, from seeds my father brought back from a nearby population. I would see them again and again on explorations around the West with friends and family, and they always make me feel at home.

Anything else we should know that you have cooking up?

We have some great natural dye blog posts in the pipeline right now. If you’d like to stay updated and receive notifications when we post new educational content, consider signing up for our newsletter! You can also find us on Instagram.