The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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 incubated to make sure that they are alive and will germinate. Freezer B’s collection contains a replica of the seeds in Freezer A, but these seeds are never touched; they stay quietly frozen for the future.

      A third freezer is being filled at the moment, and this is just the beginning: there is space for many more as the seed bank increases its collection. ‘You could get 38 double decker buses in this underground vault,’ says Stuppy. Already these freezers contain the greatest concentration of plant biodiversity on the planet: 10 per cent of the world’s wild plant species. In years to come, this will diversify even more. The MSB is hoping to save 25 per cent by 2020. We went back upstairs for a look at the incubator rooms, where seeds from Freezer A are periodically grown into seedlings to make sure that the seeds being stored are still healthy. Each brightly lit incubator is kept at a different temperature: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25°C (41, 50, 59, 68, 77°F), depending on the type of plant they are set up to incubate. We popped our heads inside one; it smelt damp and mouldy. Inside were the seeds of a plant called Cousinia platylepis, and they were germinating well.

      I asked Stuppy what happens to the germinating seeds. ‘They belong to the country of origin, so they are all destroyed. The only reason for growing them is to make sure the seeds in the freezer are still alive and healthy,’ he answered. He explained that bio-piracy is a big problem, which countries want to guard against, so acquiring seeds from other countries involves lots of contracts and teams of lawyers, and part of the deal is that no germinating plants will be grown without permission having been given by the country that sent the seed.

      Brazil won’t let anyone keep seeds from its country, because it doesn’t want anyone to own seeds from Brazil which might be valuable later – a wonder drug perhaps, as yet to be discovered, that grows in the Amazon. ‘What about other countries?’ I asked. ‘America doesn’t have a large national seed bank for wild species (they have many large crop seed banks, though). Svalbard, Norway, only has crops. The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany, in China, and the MSB are the two biggest seed banks for wild species in the world’, Stuppy explained.

      In an ideal world, the MSB would not need to exist; instead, the plants contained in the frozen ark of seeds would be growing naturally in the wild. As it is, the MSB sees its project as a race against time. Who knows how many life-saving plants are growing on the Earth that are yet to be discovered? Imagine if one dies out before its unique properties are found? I wonder how many precious medicines are frozen in the vaults now.

      We’re facing a global emergency. By the end of this century, half the world’s existing plants could be extinct. It is up to us to change. Our lives depend on plants for food, fuel, medicine, textiles, chemicals and for the oxygen we breathe. Without plants, we cannot survive, so why are we not doing more to grow what we can and to protect what we have? At least the seed bank is giving us options for the future while we sort things out. It’s a start.

      Scientists at Kew are looking into the effects of climate change on plants, and are studying wild species that have traits that will be needed in crops if the Earth heats up – for example, short stems and bigger leaves; wild flowers are a miracle of adaptive design. Mainly, however, the frozen seeds are here as a life insurance for plant species and for human beings of the future.

      When I left the seeds behind, I went for a wander around the gardens that surround the seed bank – the grounds of Wakehurst Place. The gorgeous landscape is a showcase for some of the frozen seeds beneath the ground, a future generation of beautiful flowering plants.

      [A Mexican seed] Lamourouxia viscosa is one of millions of seeds inside the seed bank. Its honeycomb design is a perfect adaptation for catching puffs of wind.

      [Entrance to the seed bank] The grey door that leads into the seed bank is surrounded by a yellow panel, set into a wall of silver. You can see it from the floor above if you visit the public area of the seed bank.

      [Freezer] We couldn’t go inside the freezers where the seeds are kept as it’s too cold – the staff who work there wrap up warmly in thick fleeces or big jackets.

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