In Case of Apocalypse Later, a Plan to Ensure America’s Regreening
NEW YORK - The botanists forged through a thicket and crossed a rocky ravine bed. Their quarry, Polygonatum pubescens, was proving elusive. But they would not rest. They had promised a shipment of its seed to their partners in a bunker across the ocean.
Just beyond a derelict chain-link fence, a man with a beard spotted pea-sized green balls dangling from a miniature awning of shiny oval leaves.
“There’s your plant,” he called out to another bearded man.
On a wooded Staten Island hillside last Wednesday, a few hundred feet from a busy road, the botanists from the city’s native plant center scored another find for a project called the Millennium Seed Bank. 
Polygonatum pubescens, slightly better known as hairy Solomon’s seal, is hardly the showiest plant in the forest, or the rarest. A plainer cousin to lily of the valley, it makes its home easily in the fragmented woodlands of Staten Island, Queens, the Bronx and similar habitats hereabouts.
Which is why the Millennium Seed Bank Project wants it.
The project, run by the Royal Botanical Garden, at Kew, England, aims to collect seeds from 10 percent of the world’s flowering plant species and to stow them in a sort of climate-controlled Noah’s Ark against the possibility of depletion, whether by climate change, alien-species invasion, overdevelopment or apocalypse.
The project has received seeds from 100 countries and every imaginable ecosystem, from the palm forests of Madagascar to the tundra of Alaska. In the Western Hemisphere, the project is stockpiling seeds from exactly one urban area: New York City.
This honor is due to the existence of New York’s municipal native-plant nursery, which the city says is the only one in the country. The Greenbelt Native Plant Center, a little-known wing of the parks department based in an old farmhouse on Staten Island, has spent two decades raising specimens of the city’s indigenous flora - most of them far humbler than hairy Solomon’s seal - for use in restoration and replanting projects.
What this means for posterity is that a hundred or a thousand years from now, should the bomb fall or the seas rise, the tellers at the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex, England, will be able to open the vault where the seeds are stored at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit and 15 percent humidity, thaw out some Polygonatum pubescens, and start New York City all over again.
“We New Yorkers sometimes think we’re not part of the planet,” said Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner. “The Millennium Seed Bank is probably the ultimate testimony to the fact that the natural areas of New York City are important, that these plants are worth preserving forever even though to the average New Yorker they may seem like a little inconsequential weed.”
The native plant center, with guidance from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is giving the Millennium Seed Bank 100 species from within 75 miles of New York City. Since last year, the botanists have collected 24 species, 8 from New York City, including flattened oat grass from the northern reaches of Central Park and northern bayberry from Staten Island.
Today at the botanic garden, officials from the seed bank and from the federal Bureau of Land Management will honor New York’s contribution, and may make a brief foray into the garden’s Native Flora collection to harvest a few seeds from an allegheny vine.
Until recently, the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, on Victory Boulevard in a western corner of the island, kept its focus local and relatively short term. When the Army Corps of Engineers needs spartina grass for wetlands reclamation or the city needs switchgrass for landfill cover, they call the plant center. But this spring, as thanks for the city’s help, the Millennium Seed Bank bought the plant center a climate-control unit so it could start its own long-term seed bank.
Now, next to the greenhouses, a walk-in cooler is filling up with little cotton sacks and plastic bags, each containing thousands of seeds in every possible shape and shade of earth tone - olive-green pellets, reddish-brown shields, fluffy tan podlets with little wings.
There is still plenty of space. “Seed storage doesn’t take up a lot of room,” said Edward Toth, the plant center’s director.
It was last Wednesday that Mr. Toth; Timothy Chambers, the center’s nursery manager; and Gerry Moore, the science director at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, set out on a scouting trip for hairy Solomon’s seal. Mr. Chambers has been keeping tabs on several populations this year, hoping that one will be prolific enough to yield the 10,000 seeds that the Millennium Seed Bank demands.
Rattling along in an old green Ford Bronco, the researchers pulled over on Brielle Avenue, opposite a newish string of brass-accented brick houses, and hiked into a tract adjoining a crumbling tuberculosis sanitarium, the old Seaview Hospital. They passed many species they had already collected for the Millennium project - maple-leaved vibernum, steeplebush with spiky stalks of tiny pink flowers, black birch - as well as a particularly impressive specimen of that quintessential Staten Island forest dweller, Automobilius burnedouticus.
The Solomon’s-seal colony, growing on a steep, moist bank of the ravine, turned out to be insufficiently fruity. Something - possibly birds, possibly disease - had taken a toll on the green seed balls that hang from the hairy undersides of the leaves.
“We’re not going to get 10,000 seeds off this site,” Mr. Toth said.
Mr. Chambers was not worried. There were still two weeks before the seeds ripened, and he knew of two other promising colonies in the area.
“It’s pretty normal,” he said. “Different things come up; populations aren’t what I thought.”
As a consolation, on the way back to the truck, the researchers paused to take oral samples of the seed covering of Rubus allegheniensis, which they had collected for the Millennium project last summer.
That is, they stopped to eat some blackberries, which were delicious.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
I do hope that the Millennium Seed Bank Project does not forget the hemp and poppy plants, like Noah did the poor unicorn.
I’m sure the insects will be grateful.
They could probably find a better location than Staten Island. How about somewhere in the Rockies.
“They could probably find a better location than Staten Island. How about somewhere in the Rockies.”
Actually, there is a separate Norweigian project to store all food crop seeds in a subfreezing bedrock chamber in the Arctic Svalbard Archipeligo.
But at any rate, the seed bank can’t be a too remote a locaton - how are the survivors going to find it?
PJD,
The seeds may only be temporary survivors on a planet dead from the suicidal madness of ecocidal humanity.
Read about the global seed vault above the arctic circle in my blog: http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com
While I think this is a worthy and noble cause, I have questions regarding the feasibility.
I wonder if, after an apocalypse, the earth would even have the same environment which would allow these seeds to grow.
And what if humans were to not survive, how will the seeds get out of the vault and be propagated?
If humans did survive, as an avid gardener I can tell you I would much rather open a vault and find seeds for plants that would feed me and other animals rather than just weeds. So I hope there is food stock in that 10%.
Bottom line, at the rate humans are breeding and destroying habitat and species I think that humanity is headed for extinction. It’s a good thing that mother earth is much more suited to re-establish life than are humans. Oh, the arrogance of humanity. The intelligence to preserve life and the ignorance to destroy it uselessly.
This is obviously a last resort effort. Sort of like covering our asses. The above posts bring up some important points. The success of the vaults in providing plant life for a decimated earth is questionable, but it’s the least we can do since the thought of global disaster only comes up because it is a reality. Great effort needs to be given at making sure the vaults are never needed for their intended purpose!
Are there any seeds of hope in that vault ?
This is long ago thinking —
We’re going to be lucky if the planet keeps turning and survives our onslaught of pollution and Global Warming.
And . . . I’d wouldn’t let MONSANTO know where the seeds are stored!!!
Two questions:
Don’t seeds have to be planted out periodically to ensure their viability, like at least every seven years or so?
Is there also an effort underway to preserve pollinators, without whom many if not most of these seeds will be unable to propagate after they are planted?
I understand what they are attempting to do, but throughout earth’s history vast populations and species have been wiped out for one reason or another and the earth continues on regardless.
Surely after interpreting the history of our current civilization those that inherit this planet from us would want nothing to do with us, our culture or our seeds. They will probably study us as we now study cro-magnon humans.
It’s a shame. People are working so hard to preserve something for their sci-fi offspring, but won’t work to stop the apocalypse from happening.
Brilliant
One major limitation of a project like this is the simple fact that you can no more consider this a way to revive a plant species than you could consider five fingers strung together a hand. You need to think of ecosystems, not individual members.
For example, what pollinating species will you be counting on? Many plant species have coevolved with fauna and depend on them in one way or another, as with flowering species whose blossoms are made for the beaks of hummingbirds. Certain hardy species might stand a chance, but as wonderful as this is, it is no remedy for Apocalpyse Later.
Nice to see a positive action. It can get depressing being too aware sometimes.
I believe if you do some research. You will find that oh somewhere around a hundred years ago give or take a few decades there was 3 other seed banks started.
I believe one was in Russia
One In The USA
and The Other I can’t remember.
The last I heard Russia’s seed bank was a joke.
The USA out west somewhere was falling apart because of neglect and lack of funding. and I believe the other where ever it was possibly England wasn’t in the best of shape.
You perhaps have heard that the seeds we today rely on to feed us all are hybreds removed so many times from their origin,that they are barely reccognizable?
Somewhere I just read that these hybreds are constantly under attack by many of the earth’s life form /insects , molds or what have you.
In one growing season one day soon our soul supply of food may just be destroyed by the natural processes of our Earth ,leaving us with no way to go back to plants of the past .
Now we have developed genetically aldered seeds to defeat Our Earth’s checks and balances. But we do not acctually know what these human developed foodstuffs will do to our own bodies over time.
This one or two World Seed Banks we are building may just be a curiousity to some alien visitor who stops by this planet and wonders what happen to all it’s life forms.
Nor would I put my money on that those one or two seed banks will be around in even 50 years from now. We probably will all be munching on SOYLENT GREEN
the aploccalypse will me followed by a massive round of looting and murder. There won’t be any time for planting seeds.
kalia,
Your Christian “aploccalypse”, which you mis-spell, is being used today as a licence for mass murder and genocide by pseudo-Christian fanatics. Yet, like their Islamic counterparts, they imagine God approves such crimes against humanity, insane hypocrites that they are !!!
One of the First things President Thomas Jefferson did was establish a seed bank, seems pretty insightful…as were his comments on an educated populace; to name a few, this first established institution has been greatly diminished under the last so called few leaders, speaking of leaders; do any of these jokers know what a balenced budget is, lets give more corporat welfare and military largess away, we have got Trillions to blow!!??? ***k our grandchildren…
I do love the idea of seed banks. I also wonder,__ who is going to be here to plant the seeds, after all life on Earth has been exterminated from atomic radiation and man made nuclear poisons?
Another question. Are they storing the seeds for phytoplankton? That microscopic plant life is the basis for all life on a water planet. When the phytoplankton are gone from our oceans, (their numbers have reduced by ten percent in the last few years.) all life, save perhaps some microberial will be dead on Earth.
Jacques Cousteau, a scientist among many other things, gave us from 60 to a 100 years if we didn’t stop using fossil fuel for energy and continued to dump nuclear wastes into the oceans. We haven’t stopped, we doubled it.