Above: Victorian collage of seeds, carefully collated and annotated. The display is mounted in an ornate frame, demonstrating the Victorian tendency to merge art with science (the two are regarded as completely separate these days). The obsessive way in which the Victorians observed and catalogued the natural world underpinned many of the great advances of the period (this was a time when almost every educated person was doing some form of research and development, even if just for their own personal interest, and coming up with insights that had great commercial potential).
There was an interesting item on this morning’s Today Programme about the Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens based at Kew. The project aims to collect seeds from endangered plants around the world, ensuring that biodiversity is preserved despite the alarming rate at which different plants are becoming extinct (seeds from all British plants have already been preserved). The seeds are put into glass jars and kept in underground vaults at low temperatures (this reminded me of the wheat that was found in Tutankhmen’s tomb – when it was planted and watered it started to grow, after three thousand years of being kept underground!).
http://www.kew.org/msbp/intro/index.htm
There was an interesting item on this morning’s Today Programme about the Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens based at Kew. The project aims to collect seeds from endangered plants around the world, ensuring that biodiversity is preserved despite the alarming rate at which different plants are becoming extinct (seeds from all British plants have already been preserved). The seeds are put into glass jars and kept in underground vaults at low temperatures (this reminded me of the wheat that was found in Tutankhmen’s tomb – when it was planted and watered it started to grow, after three thousand years of being kept underground!).
http://www.kew.org/msbp/intro/index.htm
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