Page 64 - The Secret Museum

THEY ARE SEEDS, INSIDE KEW’S Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). This particular seed is

Lamourouxia viscosa from Mexico and is one of millions stored there. It has a
lovely honeycomb cage, so that it can float in the air and spread the range of its plant.
I like the design of this seed but, really, I could have chosen any of the seeds
preserved in the vaults of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, because each is unique and
precious.

Seeds first appeared on Earth some 360 million years ago, and since then they
have spread across all environments. They are amazingly diverse, come in all kinds
of shapes and range in size from the largest seed in the world, the coco de mer palm

(Lodoicea maldivica) from the Seychelles, which looks like a big, curvaceous
bottom (Linnaeus called it Lodoicea callipyge, callipyge meaning ‘lovely-bummed’)
to orchid seeds the size of a speck of dust.

Some seeds can remain alive in the ground for hundreds of years if need be, until
the conditions are just right for them to germinate. A date palm seed estimated to be
2,000 years old was discovered in 1963 when Herod the Great’s fortress of Masada
near the Dead Sea was excavated. It was planted in 2005, and now Methuselah, as
the plant is called, stands over a metre high. The amazing ability that seeds have to

pause in time was the inspiration behind the Millenium Seed Bank Partnership.

Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the seed bank, showed me around. He
explained that one in five species of plant on Earth is faced with extinction. In 2000,
Kew began collecting seeds as life insurance for the future. They started by
collecting thousands of seeds from every species of wild British flowering plant and
freezing them so that, in the future, if any become extinct, we will have their seeds,
here in Sussex. It will be possible to defrost them, grow them and reintroduce them to
the countryside. There are about 1,400 native seed-bearing plants in the UK, and 90

per cent of them are protected here, carefully frozen for the future. Britain was the
first country in the world to do this with their seeds.

The seed bank has a nursery in which it grows flowers that once adorned British
meadows countrywide, such as the cuckoo flower, green field speedwell and the
harebell. Slowly, the people who work there are trying to get Britain to remember its
native wild beauty. Some plants that were once extinct, such as a starry aquatic herb,
called starfruit, have already been reintroduced into the countryside.

The seed bank has also begun to stretch its green fingers across the world.
Working with more than 50 countries worldwide, it has so far been collecting wild

flowering plants that grow in the world’s dry lands. When turned into food, clothing,
medicine and building materials, these flowering plants help to support 1 billion
people. To date, the seed bank has saved seeds from ten per cent of the world’s wild
plant species, and is adding to that number all the time. In the future, the range of
seeds collected will hopefully expand to include those from the tropical rainforest,
and then from all types of terrain found on the planet.

We began our trip around the seed bank in Stuppy’s office, where he showed me