In my kitchen I have an old shoe box. It’s full of seeds – seeds which I’ve collected from my own plants or elsewhere, commercially bought seeds, even a few which I appropriated from the hamster’s food to see what would come up …I thought I had a good collection, but I hadn’t realised what is going on at Kew Gardens. The Millennium Seed Bank has just reached its one billionth seed. The Seed Bank is an attempt to counter the loss of biodiversity which is currently happening on the planet due to climate change, deforestation and so on, by saving seeds which can then be used in the future. They’ve already got 18,000 species, some of which are now extinct in the wild, and the aim is to get to 25% of the world’s 300,000 species by 2020.
They presumably have a bit more storage space than a shoe box.
1 comment:
Seeds are so fun, aren't they? I went from a little file folder to now an antique briefcase.
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