Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership – UK

Home to Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, efforts to secure the safe storage of 25% of the world’s plants by 2020 all began here in the UK.

two people in river holding bag to put collected seeds in

Collecting seeds in the UK (Image: Andrew McRobb, RBG Kew)

Plant life in the UK is under threat

People do not usually think of the UK flora as being endangered but some 317 wild plants are threatened with national extinction. Contributors to this threat are intensive agriculture, urbanisation, road-building, pollution and climate change. Causing concern is the Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus). In the 1930’s it was widespread but in 1990 was found in only 3 of the 10km grid squares surveyed. This is possibly the most dramatic decline of any of our native wildflowers.

Saving seeds for the future in the UK

It was appropriate to tackle the conservation of our own flora before undertaking projects overseas, so the first phase of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Project commenced with the UK Flora Programme.

This ambitious project set out to conserve all native flowering plants that produce bankable seeds. It was thought that the UK flora might have a number of species that would present special storage difficulties. For example, aquatic species, which disperse their fruit or seeds under the water surface, and plants such as orchids, which produce almost microscopic seeds. Research at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has addressed these issues and found that, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of such species are easily stored under standard seed bank conditions.

Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) (Image: Steve Alton, RBG Kew)

To date, Kew’s MSBP has been successful in collecting seed from around 90% of the UK's native ‘higher plants’. This is the first time that any country has underpinned the conservation of its wild flora in this way. The remaining species either produce no seed at all, or seed which cannot be stored conventionally, or are too rare or fruit too infrequently for a collection to have been made without compromising their survival. Efforts continue, however, to track down and bank those last few, elusive species.

In total, more than half of the seed collections made came from the active and skilled volunteer botanical community in the UK, particularly the local Wildlife Trusts and the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI). Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Project is indebted to those individuals who gave up their time to assist.

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