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When Will Bonsall was growing up in Waterville in the 1950s and ’60s, his family lived modestly, and their grocery budgets were often tight. His folks weren’t much for gardening, and what fresh produce they brought home was rationed among him and his two brothers. His grandparents, however, lived on a small farm in nearby Belgrade, and whenever he and his family visited, the stockpiles of homegrown sweet corn and juicy beefsteak tomatoes seemed endless. There was no need to negotiate shares with his brothers. “To me,” Bonsall says, “that was the epitome of rich, gracious living.”

Today, Bonsall lives on a dirt road in Industry, in the western Maine foothills, in a farmhouse atop a terraced slope covered with apple trees and overlooking lush gardens. When I first visited him there, last May, the 70-year-old homesteader and author welcomed me warmly into his kitchen, sat me by his woodstove, and launched into a chitchatty, meandering discourse on potato scab, plant sex, and his dream of winning a MacArthur “genius grant.” Bonsall is a talker, and it was more than an hour before he offered to show me the space I had come to see, a second-floor room that he calls his office. “It’s a godawful mess,” he warned.

Bonsall led me upstairs, his white ponytail swinging behind him, and into a small room filled with boxes and bags overflowing with dried plant stalks and stems. “Some of the mess is mice,” he said, looking at the floor. Dusty sunlight fell through a window onto a wall of shelves, each one lined with rows of wooden cases the size of shoeboxes. Inside the cases were envelopes, many of them brown with age, and inside the envelopes were seeds — tens of thousands of them, the core of what was once among the country’s most prolific private seed collections.