TRANSCRIPTS

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With the threat of extinction hanging over so many plant species, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew have set out to collect and preserve some of the most endangered.

Sandra Sykes joins the team of seed collectors working for the Millennium Seed Bank Project in Seeds for Rainy Day.

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The really exciting thing about this particular project is that we are collecting and conserving 24 thousand species, wild species, that’s 10 percent of the world’s bankable   seed floor from 16 countries at the moment and this has never been done before. We’ve done plenty with crops - and that’s an old technology which has been developed over the millennium - but what we’re doing here is entirely new. We’re working out how to store and how to revive wild species and that gives us options. That means that we...we’ll be in the future in the position to reintroduce these into the wild, to grow them and to use them.

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Cloze test

Seed collecting is all about getting the timing right. In this case Erich didn’t think the seed was ripe enough to take but looking at it through the lens, Paul thought that it might be worth a chance. ...  

If we can find more plants, get the best and the biggest ones from all the bushes, if we are going to be around again in a month or two, come back and bulk up the collection. If not, you’ve already got some at least.

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Later that evening, Paul told me how the seed we collected that day would be taken to Pretoria to be cleaned.

All the seeds are owned by South Africa under a legally binding Access and Benefit- Sharing Agreement.

Half stay in the national gene bank and the other half are couriered to Kew.

ad e) timing 9:18-10:20

It’s stored in minus 20˚C. It is cold and it slows their metabolism right down. And the great thing about that, of course, is that they are in a very low maintenance which may keep them cold and that’s all and they last like that for hundreds of years. So much easier than, say, trying to conserve these species in a botanical garden. Yes, because   that’s a very high maintenance. They may hybridize with other species, they may die from disease or whatever from year to year in case of annuals, so this is very much easier. But the most important thing that happens to the seed when it comes to Kew is that they‘re tested for germination. It’s very important that we’re able to revive them.  Otherwise there‘s no point in holding them. So we have several teams of scientists who use different methodologies to revive the plants to germinate the seed we collect.

Each germination test uses a hundred of seeds and then, when we’ve  worked out how germinate the seed, we have to test the viability periodically every ten years or so we would check with the further hundred seeds and it’s the reason we need to collect a lot of seed initially.