Real seed packets are tiny billboards: a picture, a variety name, sowing dates in three languages. Ours is blank brown paper, folded once.
Blankness is the variety. A printed packet promises a known plant. Our sitters are fictional, so the packet on this desk promises only that something will grow from a written brief. The paper stays unprinted because the life inside the book beside it has not been bred, named or sold by anyone.
There is a craft reason too. Print is where generations go to invent their most convincing nonsense — near-words, melted labels. A brief that demands a completely blank packet removes the trap: the paper is either plain or the frame is culled.
Briefing plain paper. Say what it is and what it lacks: ‘plain unprinted brown-paper seed packet, no label, no picture, no markings’. Stand it upright for the chapter portraits; lay it flat when the sitter leans in. One packet only — a scatter of packets turns a desk into a potting shed.
Keep the packet smaller than the book. It is the footnote of the composition, not its subject: seed beside story, the beginning beside the whole life.