The Millennium Seed Bank, Wakehurst Place.





The millennium Seed Bank was built as a millennium project and opened in 2000.
Its main objective at the time was to house the seed of all UK flora. It has achieved this and currently stores seed for other member countries as well. As you can see from these pictures it is an extensive building with research labs, seed storage vault, seed cleaning facilities, office and lecture space as well as residential facilities for students/researchers. It has a life expectancy of five hundred years and the vault can apparently withstand the impact of a plane crash since it is on the flight path for Gatwick airport.

http://www.kew.org/msbp/



The building is quite unique in that visitors can see most of the work undertaken by staff. Visitors enter the middle of the building and through glass walls on either side can view the labs and seed treatment facilities, they can even at the end where this photo was taken, look down into the seed vault although they do not have access.





When seeds arrive in cotton or paper bags they are dried to 15% MC, this is critical since it halts seed metabolism and ensures seed longevity. They are held in the drying room which is also a quarantine centre until ready for cleaning.












The seed cleaning lab uses a variety of equipment to clean the seed, from mechanical apirators to hand sieves. As much of the chaff and seed capsule is removed as possible without damaging the seed, this will help maximize storage space.




















All seed lots are X rayed to determine viability, this image demonstrates potential viable and non viable embryos, some even show insect damage. This is not a measure of seed germination potential however.







Our group in the residential course was quite diverse, with people from South Africa, United States, England, Greece, Italy, Uganda and The Gambia. Here we are studying fruit morphology in the lab on day two. The course was quite intense and began at 9:00am and usually ran until 5:30pm. Of course many nights were spent at the pub.










Seed dissection to determine embryo viability was challenging especially with small seeds under the electronic microscopes. Many seeds went scittering across the lab floor.









The entrance to the seed packing room and the storage vaults.

Once the seed is cleaned and prooofed (cut tests, X ray etc.) it is sent down to the vault, this(below) is the packing room outside the -20c vaults




















Jars of seed ready to go into the vault, the seed lots do not contain plant names just numbers. The reasoning for this is quite simple, plant names are in a continual state of flux and as the seed is stored for a long time (hundreds of years) the labels would have to be changed also. Plant names and the resigstration number are maintained in the data base, and the plant name can be easily changed there without interupting storage in the vault.








If you go to the link I posted near the top of the page you can find the full story of how these plants (below) grew from 200 year old seed, here seen in The millennium Seed Bank greenhouse being grown on to confirm indentification, several of the original packets were mislabeled.

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The last day before we all went our separate ways, two from the University of Sussex, six from the University of Birmingham, two from Kirsentbosch Botanical Gardens in South Africa, one from the New England Wildflower Society (Garden in the Woods), one from the New York CityParks Department (native plant nursery) and one from the North Carolina Botanic Gardens.

The House and Gardens of Wakehurst Place, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

Pictured is the main mansion at Wakehurst Place, this used to house the millennium Seed Bank, now it functions as an activity centre. Wakehurst, managed by Kew but owned by the National Trust is the most visited trust garden in England.

As you have no doubt realized I have been a little lapse in updating the blog. As with most students I have experienced the intensity of the end of term. Classes finished for most this past week, however since we are out of alignment we still have another week to go with a substantial lab report to submit and an oral presentation on Monday.

I have spent the past couple of Saturdays in the lab working on transforming the resurrection plant Craterostigma plantagineuum with Agrobacterium tumefaciens. I conclude this experiment in two weeks by handing the cultured plants with the transferred genes off to the researchers at the University of York. I think the experiment has been a success with many plants hopefully carrying the transferred genes: York will have to authenticate this through PCR (My students should know all about this since I have been posting all my lab reports and essays online, if anyone else is interested I can send them to you but they are much too long and boring for most to post here).

I am putting the blog up in two to three sections, this posting will show pictures of the gardens at Wakehurst Place. Wakehurst is home to the Millennium Seed Bank and is the main arboretum for Kew proper which is about 60km away. We spent the week of November 27th staying at the seed bank and so I had some time in the morning to walk the grounds and take a few pictures, it is getting cold here at times as that is frost you see on the lawns.

For those that have a good memory, there is a picture of the Red Border at Wakehurst in my house (Adam and Anita can show you if you drop by) in the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom. That picture was taken on our NPC field trip in 1986 with the infamous Tom Laviolette; it has only taken me 20 years to return.
Below is the famous Red Border today, obviously not in full form but alas it is November, however it still looks good to me.

It is hard to believe that the Rhododendrons are flowering in November, but many are along with Mahonia, Bergenia and the occasionall Viburnum, I understood it snowed yesterday, while I walked along the beach eating a Cornish Pasty, I know some of you will make me pay for rubbing it in.

Wakhurst Place is essentially a woodland garden with deep valleys where the stream dissectss the gardens. This terminates in a resivoir at the bottom of the 600 acre estate and the Lode Valley. In 1987 a hurricane swept across southern England and devastated many gardens by toppling large trees. Wakehurst was severelyy hit but today there is little evidence of the devastation.

http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/visitor/visitwp.html

Several have asked for my address here in England, here it is: 73 Holingbury Park Avenue, Brighton, BN1 7JQ, United Kingdom.

Guy Fawkes Night



England moves by train, they are cheap and efficient. In fact it is cheaper for me to take the train to the university every day than the bus: a roundtrip train fare is £2.50 or about $5.20. England was built on rails and they went to great lengths to ensure that they were not disruptive. This is a viaduct that traverses a part of downtown Brighton; it is over 100 years old and is quite a feat of engineering, especially when you consider it is made of bricks.

As I mentioned earlier there are now two of us in the MSc Plant Conservation course. Bakary Seenah joined me mid-October. He is from The Gambia where he is in charge of the seed collection unit for that country. It is quite interesting talking to him; we take so much for granted. There are five people in our lab, they are all coming over for dinner tonight so I hope to post a group shot, we have a Canadian (me) a Gambian, two Ghanese and a Indian.

The weather has been incredible of late and I spent Thursday afternoon on the beach, people were actually swimming. On Saturday I took off with Geoff, the musician who lives in the flat above me for Lewes for Guy Fawkes Night.

To get to Lewes, we biked up to Ditchling Beacon and across the ridge of the South Downs, this is the highest point of land around and in the distance you can see the North Downs which I am told are not as spectacular. The large complex is Plymton Agricultural College.

The town of Lewes has a 400 year tradition of bonfires and parades; the town of 12,000 people is inundated on November 5 by 50,000 visitors. We went by bike since it was an hour wait to get back out by train. The pictures do not do it justice; it was absolutely incredible with each of the societies trying to out do each other. Every November 5 people burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the houses of parliament. It is celebrated in Lewes since, on the edge of town a battle was fought that eventually lead to the formation of parliament.

Guy Fawkes , 1606, also known as Guido Fawkes, born in York, was an English Soldier and member of a group of Roman Catholics who attempted to carry out the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605. The plot was an attempt to assinate the Protestant King James I (James VI of Scotland) and the members of both houses of the Parliment of England. He tried to achieve this by blowing up Westminster Palace during the formal opening session of the 1605 Parliament, in which the king would address a joint assembly of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Guy Fawkes was in large part responsible for the later stages of the plan's execution. His activities were detected, however, before the plan's completion. Following a severe interrogation involving the use of torture and a trial at Westminster Hall , Fawkes and his conspirators were executed for treason and attempted murder.

Of course all that cycling is thirsty work; we came back via the local pub in Falmer Village at the university. I am a local here now and know the owner and his wife quite well as we closed the pub on Saturday night. John, the landlord is an avid model train enthusiast and has one running around the top of the bar.

On the Beach


On the beach is a title from one of my favourite albums by Chris Rea. This was where most of Saturday was spent, it was warm and sunny, however the planned bicycle trip over the East Downs on Sunday was postponed because of the torrential downpours. I was joined by Bakery in the MSc course this week; he arrived late and is from the Gambia where he is in charge of the countries first seed bank, hence I can see a trip to the Gambia one summer. He had not been into town; he stays at the university, so this was my chance to act as tour guide.





Brighton has one main pier nowadays and that’s where most of the photographs were taken from, as you can see it is quite a distance out and reminds me of Coney Island since it is all cheap food and cheap amusements.



From the current pier you can see the remnants of the old pier that was abandoned and then recently caught fire. They plan on building a tall viewing ‘Thing’ on this site and it is quite controversial since it will clash with the regency architecture that fronts that part of the beach. Frank Gehry has a project planned for the ocean front as well; it looks like a building undergoing convulsions, typical Gehry style. I will try to get an image to share with you at some point.





















On Brighton pier of course is where the crippled Jonathan Livingston Seagull hangs out after failing at his high flying acrobatics. It is amazing how smart he is ( how do you determine the sex of a seagull?), there he stands on one leg at feeding height in the midst of all, looking for handouts, all he needed was a cup and sign.





















On the way back from the pier we passed the Quaker Meeting House, actually we went in since they were having a sale of local produce. I put this in for my friend Tina who is a Quaker and once took me to the Quaker meeting house in Coldstream. Tina, they all have the same feeling, this one however sits on prime real estate close to the ocean in the old part of town.















The final shot is the last hill I go down everyday that I ride the bike to the university, and of course it is one of the first four I must go up on my return journey home. This was taken half way before I entered Stamnar Woods for the rest of the climb.

The Week That Was





At the top of the hill about five minutes walk from the house is an ancient Roman fort. It is the highest point of land for miles around with views to the ocean and the Sussex Downs. On a clear day you can see both the city of Brighton and Hove and the village of Falmer and the University of Sussex as seen in this photo.






In the city of Brighton is the Royal Pavilion. The pavilion was built in 1802 by the then George, Prince of Wales later to become king George IV. The gardens around the pavilion were designed by John Nash and laid out in the regency style. This style of gardening and plant display is somewhat eclectic in nature with large informal beds of mixed trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs and annual plantings. The gardens look unkempt since the mown grass is 'loosely mown' emulating how it would have been scythed in the 1800's. In my opinion, after viewing many gardens of an earlier or similar period where they are mown it is just an excuse to save money and time. Nonetheless it is an interesting landscape with uninteresting plants. The graduation ceremony for the postgraduates is held here in January.


http://www.royalpavilion.org.uk/


On Sunday it was once again a tour around the countryside, this time over a portion of the downs. The Sussex Downs is an area of open grassland and low deep valleys which are usually treed. Once in the open on the downs it is very windy, hence the lack of trees. If you look at the first image and imagine you were in that image inthe top right hand corner looking back you could be standing at this gate at the edge of the woods. This was the most spectacular trip so far, 6 hours of ever changing but dramatic scenery. There are few hills now that will stop me since some of them are several miles in length I am getting a tremendous workout since we figured it was over thirty miles of fairly technical terrain. We finished our trip some six hours later back at the house, however not before stopping at the little cafe on the beach for a cup of tea.


http://www.vic.org.uk/




The beach in Brighton stretches for miles and is mainly pebbles, however along the entire stretch is the promenade where you can walk or cycle. This is in front of the cafe where we stopped for tea at about 6:30pm on Sunday.








Of course I have to put some serious stuff in as well. To prove to my students that school is not all fun and play. Here I am working in the lab (plant stress unit) performing micropropagation (tissue cultures) of a rare endangered British orchid called Dactylorhiza and cultures of a carnivorous plant called Drosera carpensis as well as a few common plants to test for seed coat cleanliness. Over the next few weeks we should see if I was successful with the cultures. This is the only place in the the world where Dactylorhiza is propagated via tissue culture.

It is called the plant stress unit since we cut up plants and do all sorts of nasty things to them inflicting stress. Tomorrow, Wednesday, I will intentionally infect the resurrection plant (Craterostigma plantagineum) with cultures of Agrobacterium and study the response. More plant stress, stay tuned!

http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/resgroups/biology/psu/1_introduction.htm

The First Week

The first week at the University of Sussex has been filled with the back to school culture that one quickly forgets as a teacher. Moving into new digs, getting a phone, and in this case for me a bike, finding the local shops and pubs and then going through the process of registration have all taken on a new vision as a student. I have to say however that the whole process went quite well, there was lot of advance work done by both myself and the university reducing the aggravation substantially.

The scenery in this part of England is spectacular, on my way to the University I cycle through Stamnar Woods and out into Stamnar Village, in a few moments one is out of the city into the country, unfortunately Stamnar Village does not have a pub.



Then there is the age thing, you seem very conscious of the fact that most of the students on campus could be your children, however they seem not to notice you or has happened several times mistook me for a teacher and requested guidance. One fellow even stopped me this week and asked if knew where the barber was on campus; as if I would have a need for such.

I have seen an amazing amount of the countryside in a very short time mainly due to Geoffrey, a musician who lives in the flat above. He is an avid cyclist and a great local resource and has spent quite a bit of time showing me around. I have purchased a new mountain bike (should have brought mine with me from Canada) and last Sunday did close to thirty miles through the villages of Stanmner, Lewes, Newhaven and back under the white cliffs to Brighton. It was an exhausting experience especially with headwinds and torrential downpours and there was grave doubt whether I would be able to walk in the morning; I did, but took the train to the University instead.

Postgrad students are really treated quite differently by the staff here at Sussex than undegraduates, since I am the only one in the MSc (Plant Conservation-Seed Banking) I have one on one lectures or discussions in the professor’s office and work alongside him in lab. This has allowed me to structure the program to my own interests which is quite exciting. I have contact with a few students from last year who are now doing there PhD in some aspect of plant science and this has been extremely beneficial.

The topics are going to be very challenging, next week it is tissue culture, followed by poikilohydry in plants and then onwards covering Ethnobotany, CITES and such. My lab work is quite complicated and essentially we are isolating the DNA of plants so that we can compare and contrast the different populations. I have also been invited to attend other lectures as they run and am in the middle of a series on carnivorous plants; fascinating.