For nearly four decades, John Coykendall’s passion has been preserving farm heritage – the seeds and stories – of a small, farming culture in Southeastern Louisiana and this work.
Deeply Rooted: John Coykendall’s Journey to Save Our Seeds and Stories airs Monday, March 25 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV.
John Coykendall is a renowned heirloom seed saver, a classically trained artist, and Master Gardener at Blackberry Farm, one of America’s top resorts. Since 1973, he has made an annual pilgrimage to Louisiana, where he has recorded the oral histories, growing techniques, recipes and folktales of Louisiana farmers and backyard gardeners in more than 80 beautifully illustrated journals. He has saved and safeguarded rare varieties of the crops they once grew, and handed them back to the communities where they came from. “Seeds carry with them more than the potential to sustain people as food, they are living history of the people who cared and tended to them and cultivated them and passed them down. I feel 100-percent total obligation, I am the caretaker,” believes Coykendall. “This is what we’re working to save, this history, the heritage, the way of life, the way of farming, way of cuisine, everything to do needs to be preserved while it’s still here to be preserved.”
A Tennessee native, 73-year-old Coykendall is a true Renaissance man and a celebrity in a growing movement that places a premium on farm-to-table cuisine and locally sourced, organic and heirloom food. He is a classically trained artist, who studied at the Ringling College of Art and Design and studied and worked as an instructor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and he is well-known for his sketches of the pastoral landscape in which he works.
For nearly 20 years, he has been the Master Gardener at one of America’s most celebrated destination resorts, Blackberry Farm, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The 4,200 acre resort, working farm and culinary mecca has been heralded by the world’s most prestigious magazines, including Travel and Leisure, Bon Appetit, Forbes, Vogue, Town & Country, Southern Living, and Garden & Gun among many others. At Blackberry Farm, John cultivates the property’s seven acres of farmland that supply the resort’s award winning restaurants with fresh from the ground, heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables.
Caption: John Coykendall • Credit: Sarah Weldon