Page 65 - The Secret Museum

the seeds he particularly likes. The most beautiful, for me, are the blue seeds from the

Malagasy traveller’s tree. The seeds are spread by lemurs, which are native to
Madagascar. Lemurs can only see the colours blue and green, so Stuppy has a hunch
that the seeds are this unique colour so that the animals can spot them and gobble
them up.

We headed off down the corridor and entered a white-walled room filled with
seeds. This is the drying room. When seeds first arrive at the seed bank, they are put
in here. They are all still in the packing containers their countries have sent them in –
plastic boxes and vials, glass jars, little freezer bags, cloth bags, paper bags, brown

envelopes and packing crates. We didn’t stay long as, Stuppy explained, ‘your
sinuses dry out before long’, but all newly arrived seeds stay here for at least three
months.

After they have dried out, the seeds are taken next door and sieved, and
subsequently put into what Stuppy calls ‘the zigzag blower’, to get rid of any fruit so
that just the seed remains; these are then cleaned and x-rayed. If most of the seeds in
the batch are ripe, and have no insects living inside them, they are put into containers
ready to be frozen.

The actual seed bank, and the freezers that contain the collection, are underground.

The entrance is through a grey door surrounded by a yellow panel set into a wall of
silver. If you ever visit the public area of the seed bank, you will see a metal
staircase that leads down to this door, but you can’t go down there, or through the
door.

Stuppy buzzed us in. The doors reminded me a bit of the spacey ones that led into
the room filled with space suits at the National Air and Space Museum’s storage unit
in Suitland, outside Washington D.C. On the other side of the doors there were no
space suits; instead we found ourselves in another drying room. Every seed selected

for freezing is dried a final time before going into its freezer, and each seed container
is numbered so that the seeds can be catalogued and found later on.

As we looked about, Stuppy was yawning rather a lot. I thought maybe he was
bored by showing me around, but it turned out that his wife had just had twin boys.
‘I’ve started keeping a diary of how many times they wake me up in the night,’ he told
me, ‘and last night it was eight.’

As we chatted about his twins, we looked into the freezers that lead off from this
room. We couldn’t go inside, as it’s too cold in there – the staff who work there wear
big jackets or fleeces. The seeds are stored at -20°C (-4°F), but a series of fans adds
a wind chill factor, so it feels like -40°C (-40°F). We peered through the glass at the

contents of the seed bank, stored in boxes on the grey metal shelves that line the
freezers, or in drawers.

At the moment, only two freezers are filled with seeds. Freezer A contains the
seeds that are taken out once a decade for testing. They are put into water and