Banking on Life: Seed Conservation at Kew Gardens
Channel: Richard Scrase
Date: 2022-09-05

This is a film I made with Mark Raeburn for Nuffield A-level Biology in 2008. We toured the Kew Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place and saw some of the main processes involved in identifying, collecting, transporting, processing and storing the seeds of endangered species. Much more recently, a friend, Aisling Irwin, wrote an article about tree conservation in Nature interviewing some of the same scientists: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02765-x
The need for seed preservation gets ever more vital. You can directly support the work: https://adoptaseed.kew.org/adopt-a-seed.html and if you would like to hear more on the subject, I also made a programme for the BBC World Service in 2009 with Whistledown. You can hear it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003yd2w