A gentle breeze makes the snowdrops dance. These flower-filled gardens in the English countryside are dramatically different from this Arctic landscape. But they have something in common. Both house vast seed vaults. One, well established; the other, just about to open.

Well, the Millennium Seed Bank is just an hour outside of London, and here, they’re storing about a billion seeds. The science and technology used in this facility is similar to that used in Svalbard, but with a crucial difference.

The seeds being collected here are part of an ongoing scientific project. Those that will be stored in the Arctic are being preserved as an emergency supply in case of regional catastrophes.

-So where are we now?
-We’re in the dry room of the Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place which is the place where all seed material coming in from many countries all over the world is landing first.

The Millennium Seed Bank’s International Coordinator shows us around the building. From the Dry Room, we move to the Seed Cleaning Lab.

And what we’re doing here is we’re passing a stream of air through the seed sample and the force of air lifts the light seeds and the debris off and leaves it in the top, and all the heavier good seeds remain in the bottom.

Finally, we enter the giant refrigerated rooms kept constantly at a temperature of minus twenty degrees. The idea is that the great majority of the species that we have will last under these conditions for several hundreds of years.

The bank in the Arctic will store seeds collected from crops. It was created specifically to provide a safety net against the accidental loss of diversity in traditional gene banks.
The motivation for the bank deep under the British countryside was similar, although it stores and works with wild plants.

This seed bank was set up as a direct response to those threats to wild plant diversity, and the knowledge that we need those plants in the future. We must give ourselves every option in the future to use the whole array of plant diversity that we currently enjoy.

Seed banks are an ancient idea. But these modern incarnations, whether they be built in rolling countryside or in the frozen Arctic, are another first line of defence in preserving the diversity of the world’s plants.

Becky Anderson, CNN, Sussex, England.