go to seed

present singular third person goes to seed · participle present going to seed · past went to seed · participle past gone to seed

1. To pass from flowering or ripening to the formation of seeds.

   Wild tomatoes, which had gone to seed or been remorselessly hoed out from the beginning of Berande, were foraged for salads, soups, and sauces.

   1911, Jack London, Adventure

2. broadlyfigurativelyTo deteriorate; to decline into an unkempt or debased condition.

   But suppose I hang about till eighty and die a childish old gentleman with a mind all gone to seed.

   1919, Jerome K. Jerome, All Roads Lead to Calvary

   3 more examples

   But the "frump" will let herself and all her surroundings go to seed, not from humbleness of mind or an overwhelming sense of her own unworthiness, but in pure complacent conceit.

   1898, Eliot Gregory, Worldly Ways and Byways

   […] if this total Taliban takeover and collapse was one of the contingencies that […] President [Joe] Biden had foreseen, then how come this plan […] went to seed so rapidly?

   2021 August 19, 27:45 from the start, in NewsHour (television production), Peter Meijer (actor), Public Broadcasting System

   I found that slick and graceful enough at 25. Now, with marriages going to seed all around me, it is the insight, the penetration, that makes me smile/wince.

   2023 May 28, Janan Ganesh, “Right on the money”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 2