In 1900, British gardeners grew over 500 varieties of tomato. Today, most garden centres stock four. The other 496 didn't disappear because nobody wanted them. The Black Brandywine. The Tigerella. The Ailsa Craig. Varieties bred over decades, adapted to British soil and British weather, passed from allotment to allotment across generations. Each one tasting completely different. Each one producing seeds you could save and replant forever. Ninety percent of them are gone from commercial channels. Replaced by four varieties that travel well, photograph uniformly, and last three weeks on a supermarket shelf. Three things vanished from the British food supply in the last century. The first was food security. The second was seed independence. The third was the taste of a tomato that actually tasted like a tomato. Most people notice the third one at the dinner table. Very few understand why it happened. I grew up thinking tomatoes just tasted like that. Watery. Uniform. Vaguely disappointing. Then I grew a Tigerella from a heritage seed bank. It tasted like something from a different species. I wanted to understand why the other one existed at all. What I found explained not just the tomatoes, but everything. Here's what happened to plant diversity in the twentieth century. In 1900, agricultural diversity was enormous. Farmers and gardeners across Britain maintained hundreds of varieties of every common vegetable — each one adapted through selection to local conditions, local taste, local soil. The seed was the knowledge. Saving it was how knowledge passed between generations. Then commercial seed breeding arrived. The focus shifted to varieties that could be sold at scale. Uniform. Stable-looking. Long shelf life. High yield per acre on industrial farmland. The old varieties couldn't compete commercially. They were irregular. They ripened at different rates. They bruised easily. They tasted better than anything the supermarkets could sell. The EU plant variety regulations of the 1970s required commercial registration of every variety sold. Registration cost money. The economics favoured large seed companies with portfolios of commercial varieties. The hundreds of heirloom varieties — each maintained by individual gardeners or small seed banks — simply couldn't justify the cost. By the end of the twentieth century, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that 75% of agricultural plant diversity had been lost from commercial channels globally. Three quarters of the varieties that had fed human civilisation for ten thousand years, gone from the shelves in less than a hundred. What replaced them were hybrids. Bred for uniformity. Bred for shelf life. Bred, ultimately, to fail at the second generation so you'd buy again next spring. Then 2023. Tesco. Three tomatoes per customer. All of them the same variety. All of them bred to survive a lorry journey from Morocco. None of them tasting like anything. The families who had heirloom varieties growing — the descendants of the 496 tomatoes that had disappeared — weren't standing in the queue. They were outside picking something that actually tasted like food. Here's what the taste difference actually means. Heirloom seeds are open-pollinated. They reproduce true to type. The Tigerella you grow this year produces seeds that grow into the same Tigerella next year. And the year after. The variety stays alive as long as someone grows it. Hybrid seeds produce one excellent generation. Save those seeds and the variety disappears. You don't get the same tomato. You get a genetic lottery. The variety dies with the harvest. Every year you plant hybrids, another generation of the old varieties stops existing in your garden. Kovy has assembled 35 varieties of heirloom seeds — including varieties that have been disappearing from garden centres for decades. 16,000+ seeds. Every one open-pollinated, non-GMO, non-hybrid. Less than a penny per seed. Save each autumn. Replant each spring. The varieties stay alive. Comes with a Beginner's Planting Guide and a Garden Planner. 90-day guarantee. 47,000+ families already have theirs. 496 varieties of British tomato didn't disappear because nobody wanted them. You can start bringing some of them back.