PUBLIC PLACES


Millennium Seed Bank


Banking on the future O


pened in 2000 by HRH the Prince of Wales, the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is a hub for scientific activity where visitors


can discover more about Kew’s vital mission to conserve 25% of the world’s plant species by 2020. “A gold reserve ... a place where this reserve currency, in this case life itself, is stored” was how Charles described the £20m Wellcome Trust Millennium Building on opening day, and the work undertaken since only serves to reinforce his description.


The bomb-proof research and cold storage facility - billed as the world’s largest ex situ plant conservation project - is a far cry from its predecessor though. “Our first seed bank was transferred here


from Kew Gardens in 1976,” explains Keith Manger, a senior manager at Wakehurst for


more than twenty years. “It was literally a chest freezer and silica gel drier, but they represented the two cornerstones of successful long-term conservation, drying and freezing.”


The MSB aims to provide an insurance policy against the extinction of plants in the wild - key to providing food, building materials, fibres for clothing, medicines and fuel - and to preserve our botanical heritage. A team of some eighty plant scientists and MSc/PhD researchers work within three glass sections housing laboratories, seed- preparation facilities and a public exhibition area above a vast storage vault. Within that setting work horticulturalists and scientists tasked with germinating seeds and growing plants from the collections as required, developing protocols that the MSB can transfer to its own seedbank and those of 189 countries


under a global partnership of knowledge, data and genetic material set up thanks to Kew’s global name in plant science and horticulture.


“I marvel at how they manage to do it,”


Keith continues. “Germinating seeds presents one of our biggest challenges as we have to overcome the plant’s dormancy strategies. Seeds are germinated within incubators that can mimic any temperature on Earth. Agar provides the optimal growing medium and once the seed radicle appears, the seedlings can be transferred to the nursery for potting up.”


Seeds are germinated and grown for various reasons - “research or analysis for novel chemical compounds for example,” adds Keith, who is particularly involved with the security of collections worldwide. “The seedbank just outside Sydney has a firebreak surrounding it because of the


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