Inside the freezer that could save a flower, by Leonie Barraclough
An original contemporary interview.
Three floors beneath the biology building at Fenmouth University, behind a steel door with a keypad and a sign reading ‘Do Not Prop Open’, sits a room kept at minus twenty degrees. Inside, on rows of metal shelves, are around 48,000 glass jars, each one holding seeds. Dr Elinor Quayle has run the Fenmouth Seed Bank for fourteen years. She meets me at the door with a spare fleece and a grin. ‘You’ll want this,’ she says. ‘Nobody believes me about the cold.’
What exactly is down here?
‘Seeds from about 6,000 species of wild plants, mostly from Britain and northern Europe. Orchids, grasses, wildflowers, trees, the wild relatives of crops like wheat, carrots and beans. Some of these plants are common. Some are so rare that there are fewer than fifty left growing anywhere. For a few, this room holds more of them than the whole of the outside world.’
You call it an insurance policy. Insurance against what?
‘Against everything we can see coming, and everything we can’t. Climate change, disease, new pests, building on habitats, a single bad summer on a cliff where the last population lives. Most of the time insurance just sits in a drawer and you forget about it. Then your house floods, and suddenly it’s the most important piece of paper you own. These jars are like that. We hope nobody ever needs most of them. But if a plant disappears in the wild, this is where it comes back from.’
Has that ever actually happened?
‘Yes, and it’s the best day of the job. A few years ago a small yellow flower was down to one patch on a stretch of riverbank. Then the river flooded and almost all of it died. We had seeds collected years earlier. We grew hundreds of plants from them in the greenhouse, and last summer volunteers put them back. When I saw it flowering in the wild again, I had to go and sit in the car for a while.’
How long can a seed survive in here?
‘It depends on the species, but dried properly and kept this cold, many will last for decades, and some for much longer. A seed is a tiny sleeping plant with a packed lunch. We just make the nap very, very long.’
It sounds painstaking.
‘It is relentless. Every seed collection is cleaned, X-rayed to check the seeds aren’t empty, dried, counted and labelled. Every few years we take a sample out and test whether it still germinates. One wrong label and a whole collection could be useless. My team are some of the most patient people on earth. They have to be.’
Does it ever feel bleak, preparing for losses?
‘Honestly? No. People imagine this as a sad place, a sort of museum of things we’re losing. I see it the other way round. It’s a room full of second chances. Every jar is a promise that it doesn’t have to be over.’
Back upstairs, in the warm, she hands me a small envelope of cornflower seeds, ‘surplus to requirements’. ‘Plant them,’ she says. ‘Insurance starts at home.’
The Fenmouth Seed Bank is described as an insurance policy for the future. How does the writer try to show this?
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