Seeds are both termini and beginnings. Inscribed with the past, they are simultaneously repositories of future potential. At a time of acute biodiversity loss and cascading environmental crises, seeds also figure large in fictional narratives concerned with issues of land, heritage, belonging, cultivation and food security. By juxtaposing the sterility of industrial agricultural monoculture with the promiscuity and unpredictable agency of open-pollinated heirloom varieties, authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth Ozeki, Diane Wilson and Barbara Kingsolver show how communities are shaped by their crops as much as they shape their crops through selective cultivation. In the work of these authors, dormant seeds have agency: they are the vehicles of complex intertwined histories of continuity and disruption that span generations, peoples and sometimes continents. Seeds narratively bridge past and future by genetically encoding local growing conditions, their breeding, displacement and survival. They further present a biological record of the collective experiences of the humans who sow, harvest and store seed. While seeds frequently signify abundance and diversity in the fiction under consideration, I here try to pay attention to the representation of their dormancy, to show how the theme of dormant agency is manifest in these texts.