If we think about seeds for one moment, they clearly represent growth and potential. Therefore, it is particularly relevant that Willy spends so much of his spare time working with seeds. Through such activity, we can see that he uses them to try and show the value of his work as both a family man and in professional terms. The way that he tries to cultivate vegetables at night clearly represents the embarrassment he feels and not being able to feed his family and not being able to provide for them, both in the present and the future. Above all, we can see that Willy feels leaving a similar legacy of lack of provision for his children as his own father left for him.
However, the occurrence of seeds in the play also point towards another metaphorical use of seeds to point towards child rearing. Willy's unshakeable belief in the American Dream has led him to follow its doctrines in raising Biff. However, clearly, the adult Biff is not the kind of person that Willy expected him to be having raised him to seize every opportunity for success. This is most strongly shown when Willy discovers that Bernard, Biff's weedy and weak childhood friend, has achieved the massive success he had desired for his own son. Willy is forced to realise that his hopes of raising a football hero have resulted in nothing more than creating a male who is unable to succeed in life in the way that his father had hoped.
Seeds therefore symbolically seem to taunt Willy with the various phantoms of failure that continue to haunt him in spite of his every deluded effort to ignore the evidence pointing against him.
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