Kew Gardens seed bank
With two in five plant species now at risk of extinction, we learn about a project collecting seeds around the world to keep them safe in an underground treasure trove
Step inside the sub-zero chambers deep beneath the grounds of Kew’s Wakehurst botanic garden in Sussex and you’ll find an Aladdin’s cave of curiosities. For here in these fire, bomb and radiationproof vaults, are billions of seeds, carefully collected from around the world and lovingly stored and preserved.
From seeds the size of dust specks to gnarly, hardy and delicate specimens, this vault is an awe-inspiring library where seeds from many of the world’s plant species have a safe home.
Set up in 2000, the Millennium Seed Bank was created to act as a kind of botanical Noah’s Ark to look after seeds from as many different plant species as possible. The idea is that, whatever the future holds, these marvellous plants could never be totally lost.
As Dr Elinor Breman (right), Senior Research Leader at the Seed Bank explains: “The vision was that the threats facing many plants, including loss of habitat, over-exploitation for say medicinal or horticultural use as well as the challenges posed by climate change were only going to get worse, so the Seed Bank was established as a way of trying to get ahead of the curve to protect plant life before it’s lost.”
While the Seed Bank aims to collect a really broad range of species, a big focus is collecting and caring for the plant species that are endangered or that are only known to grow in one particular area, meaning their entire population could be wiped
out if something happened in that place.
They also look for seeds that might be economically important or useful. For example, now some popular crops are struggling to deal with the changing climate, finding and preserving the wild relatives of these crops, which may be more drought or heat resistant, for example, could act as a substitute crop and even help feed the world in the future.
Once the Seed Bank and its partners at national seed banks around the world have identified the species that most need conserving, scientists such as Elinor then go on collecting missions to find the seeds they need, which can take them from the Arctic to the Antarctic to anywhere in between.
“We do lots of planning before a mission but once we’re there it can take days to actually locate the plant, especially if it’s not currently in flower as you’re just looking at twigs and leaves,” she explains.
In other cases, it’s more about just collecting as many species as possible, such as a recent mission Elinor undertook in Bhutan in the Himalayas where she saved all the flora she could before a hydraulic power plant flooded the whole landscape.
Whatever the situation, usually the country in which the plant is found keeps some of the seeds while the rest go back to the Millennium Seed Bank. Here, the seeds are dried, cleaned and placed in an airtight container to then be frozen in the vaults at -20°C to help them last for as long as possible.
But that’s not the end of the story as Elinor is keen to point out this is by no means simply a museum of frozen seeds. Instead, many of these seeds are soon called upon to come back to life for a variety of reasons. “We send out around 1,000 seed collections each year for research as well as growing many species at botanic gardens so that people have the chance to admire and learn more about these amazing plants that need our protection,” she says.
Some of the seeds have also already made the most of their role as an insurance species. This was the case most recently with the clover glycine, a rare plant species native to Australia that has long been listed as vulnerable to extinction. An incredible 1,200 of the clover glycine’s seeds were sent to the Millennium Seed Bank 12 years ago for safe-keeping and this year, when bushfires destroyed huge areas of land that were home to the rare herb, scientists at the Seed Bank were able to send seeds back to Australia. The vast majority have now started growing again.
“What’s so exciting is that our seed bank collection has the power to be completely transformative,” says Elinor. “We understand so little about the natural world and yet here we have a library of plant life that we can explore
‘The bank sent seeds to Australia of a plant species destroyed in bush fires’
for its abilities to help humanity. In our collection, we could find the next cure for cancer or the next big food craze. It’s amazing.”
Now Elinor just hopes she and her colleagues can work with even more countries around the world to save even more species. They’re also developing a new cytotechnology, which will see seeds frozen in liquid nitrogen, as a way to preserve plants that typically come from rainforest environments that cannot be frozen in the traditional way, all of which poses big opportunities in the years to come.
■ If you’d like to support the Millennium Seed Bank you can make a donation at https:// support.kew.org/donate/givetokew You can also visit the seed bank at Wakehurst, Sussex (with social distancing in place). Call 01444
894066 or visit www.kew.org/wakehurst