The Secret Museum

There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species. His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered in his own annotations.

The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.

The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.

[The world of Linnaeus] I went to see thousands of specimens and books that belonged to Linnaeus. They were brought from his home in Sweden to London, and were used to found the Linnean Society.

[Linnaea borealis] Linnaeus’s signature flower, the twinflower or Linnaea borealis, named in his honour.

[Linnaeus’s pearls] Linnaeus was the first person to culture artificial pearls in a mollusc. Some of his pearls turned out better than others.

[Andromeda] Linnaeus drew this sketch inside the journal that he wrote while in Lapland.

[Systema Naturae] The first edition of Systema Naturae had only 11 pages but Linnaeus added to the book over the years, adding new species as he discovered them. The 13th edition appeared in 1770 and was 3,000 pages long. ‘God created – Linnaeus organized.’ That was how Linnaeus summed up his lifetime achievements.

THEY ARE SEEDS, INSIDE KEW’S Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). This particular seed is Lamourouxia viscosa from Mexico and is one of millions stored there. It has a lovely honeycomb cage, so that it can float in the air and spread the range of its plant. I like the design of this seed but, really, I could have chosen any of the seeds preserved in the vaults of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, because each is unique and precious.

Seeds first appeared on Earth some 360 million years ago, and since then they have spread across all environments. They are amazingly diverse, come in all kinds of shapes and range in size from the largest seed in the world, the coco de mer palm (Lodoicea maldivica) from the Seychelles, which looks like a big, curvaceous bottom (Linnaeus called it Lodoicea callipyge, callipyge meaning ‘lovely-bummed’) to orchid seeds the size of a speck of dust.

Some seeds can remain alive in the ground for hundreds of years if need be, until the conditions are just right for them to germinate. A date palm seed estimated to be 2,000 years old was discovered in 1963 when Herod the Great’s fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea was excavated. It was planted in 2005, and now Methuselah, as the plant is called, stands over a metre high. The amazing ability that seeds have to pause in time was the inspiration behind the Millenium Seed Bank Partnership.

Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the seed bank, showed me around. He explained that one in five species of plant on Earth is faced with extinction. In 2000, Kew began collecting seeds as life insurance for the future. They started by collecting thousands of seeds from every species of wild British flowering plant and freezing them so that, in the future, if any become extinct, we will have their seeds, here in Sussex. It will be possible to defrost them, grow them and reintroduce them to the countryside. There are about 1,400 native seed-bearing plants in the UK, and 90 per cent of them are protected here, carefully frozen for the future. Britain was the first country in the world to do this with their seeds.

The seed bank has a nursery in which it grows flowers that once adorned British meadows countrywide, such as the cuckoo flower, green field speedwell and the harebell. Slowly, the people who work there are trying to get Britain to remember its native wild beauty. Some plants that were once extinct, such as a starry aquatic herb, called starfruit, have already been reintroduced into the countryside.

The seed bank has also begun to stretch its green fingers across the world. Working with more than 50 countries worldwide, it has so far been collecting wild flowering plants that grow in the world’s dry lands. When turned into food, clothing, medicine and building materials, these flowering plants help to support 1 billion people. To date, the seed bank has saved seeds from ten per cent of the world’s wild plant species, and is adding to that number all the time. In the future, the range of seeds collected will hopefully expand to include those from the tropical rainforest, and then from all types of terrain found on the planet.

We began our trip around the seed bank in Stuppy’s office, where he showed me the seeds he particularly likes. The most beautiful, for me, are the blue seeds from the Malagasy traveller’s tree. The seeds are spread by lemurs, which are native to Madagascar. Lemurs can only see the colours blue and green, so Stuppy has a hunch that the seeds are this unique colour so that the animals can spot them and gobble them up.

We headed off down the corridor and entered a white-walled room filled with seeds. This is the drying room. When seeds first arrive at the seed bank, they are put in here. They are all still in the packing containers their countries have sent them in – plastic boxes and vials, glass jars, little freezer bags, cloth bags, paper bags, brown envelopes and packing crates. We didn’t stay long as, Stuppy explained, ‘your sinuses dry out before long’, but all newly arrived seeds stay here for at least three months.

After they have dried out, the seeds are taken next door and sieved, and subsequently put into what Stuppy calls ‘the zigzag blower’, to get rid of any fruit so that just the seed remains; these are then cleaned and x-rayed. If most of the seeds in the batch are ripe, and have no insects living inside them, they are put into containers ready to be frozen.

The actual seed bank, and the freezers that contain the collection, are underground. The entrance is through a grey door surrounded by a yellow panel set into a wall of silver. If you ever visit the public area of the seed bank, you will see a metal staircase that leads down to this door, but you can’t go down there, or through the door.

Stuppy buzzed us in. The doors reminded me a bit of the spacey ones that led into the room filled with space suits at the National Air and Space Museum’s storage unit in Suitland, outside Washington D.C. On the other side of the doors there were no space suits; instead we found ourselves in another drying room. Every seed selected for freezing is dried a final time before going into its freezer, and each seed container is numbered so that the seeds can be catalogued and found later on.

As we looked about, Stuppy was yawning rather a lot. I thought maybe he was bored by showing me around, but it turned out that his wife had just had twin boys. ‘I’ve started keeping a diary of how many times they wake me up in the night,’ he told me, ‘and last night it was eight.’

As we chatted about his twins, we looked into the freezers that lead off from this room. We couldn’t go inside, as it’s too cold in there – the staff who work there wear big jackets or fleeces. The seeds are stored at -20°C (-4°F), but a series of fans adds a wind chill factor, so it feels like -40°C (-40°F). We peered through the glass at the contents of the seed bank, stored in boxes on the grey metal shelves that line the freezers, or in drawers.

At the moment, only two freezers are filled with seeds. Freezer A contains the seeds that are taken out once a decade for testing. They are put into water and incubated to make sure that they are alive and will germinate. Freezer B’s collection contains a replica of the seeds in Freezer A, but these seeds are never touched; they stay quietly frozen for the future.

A third freezer is being filled at the moment, and this is just the beginning: there is space for many more as the seed bank increases its collection. ‘You could get 38 double decker buses in this underground vault,’ says Stuppy. Already these freezers contain the greatest concentration of plant biodiversity on the planet: 10 per cent of the world’s wild plant species. In years to come, this will diversify even more. The MSB is hoping to save 25 per cent by 2020. We went back upstairs for a look at the incubator rooms, where seeds from Freezer A are periodically grown into seedlings to make sure that the seeds being stored are still healthy. Each brightly lit incubator is kept at a different temperature: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25°C (41, 50, 59, 68, 77°F), depending on the type of plant they are set up to incubate. We popped our heads inside one; it smelt damp and mouldy. Inside were the seeds of a plant called Cousinia platylepis, and they were germinating well.

I asked Stuppy what happens to the germinating seeds. ‘They belong to the country of origin, so they are all destroyed. The only reason for growing them is to make sure the seeds in the freezer are still alive and healthy,’ he answered. He explained that bio-piracy is a big problem, which countries want to guard against, so acquiring seeds from other countries involves lots of contracts and teams of lawyers, and part of the deal is that no germinating plants will be grown without permission having been given by the country that sent the seed.

Brazil won’t let anyone keep seeds from its country, because it doesn’t want anyone to own seeds from Brazil which might be valuable later – a wonder drug perhaps, as yet to be discovered, that grows in the Amazon. ‘What about other countries?’ I asked. ‘America doesn’t have a large national seed bank for wild species (they have many large crop seed banks, though). Svalbard, Norway, only has crops. The Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany, in China, and the MSB are the two biggest seed banks for wild species in the world’, Stuppy explained.

In an ideal world, the MSB would not need to exist; instead, the plants contained in the frozen ark of seeds would be growing naturally in the wild. As it is, the MSB sees its project as a race against time. Who knows how many life-saving plants are growing on the Earth that are yet to be discovered? Imagine if one dies out before its unique properties are found? I wonder how many precious medicines are frozen in the vaults now.

We’re facing a global emergency. By the end of this century, half the world’s existing plants could be extinct. It is up to us to change. Our lives depend on plants for food, fuel, medicine, textiles, chemicals and for the oxygen we breathe. Without plants, we cannot survive, so why are we not doing more to grow what we can and to protect what we have? At least the seed bank is giving us options for the future while we sort things out. It’s a start.

Scientists at Kew are looking into the effects of climate change on plants, and are studying wild species that have traits that will be needed in crops if the Earth heats up – for example, short stems and bigger leaves; wild flowers are a miracle of adaptive design. Mainly, however, the frozen seeds are here as a life insurance for plant species and for human beings of the future.

When I left the seeds behind, I went for a wander around the gardens that surround the seed bank – the grounds of Wakehurst Place. The gorgeous landscape is a showcase for some of the frozen seeds beneath the ground, a future generation of beautiful flowering plants.

[A Mexican seed]Lamourouxia viscosa is one of millions of seeds inside the seed bank. Its honeycomb design is a perfect adaptation for catching puffs of wind.

[Entrance to the seed bank] The grey door that leads into the seed bank is surrounded by a yellow panel, set into a wall of silver. You can see it from the floor above if you visit the public area of the seed bank.

[Freezer] We couldn’t go inside the freezers where the seeds are kept as it’s too cold – the staff who work there wrap up warmly in thick fleeces or big jackets.

THE FIRST MUSEUM IN BRITAIN was The Ark, in Lambeth, London. Two gardeners, John and John Tradescant, opened it. They were father and son. The duo went on plant-hunting expeditions around the world to harvest the best of the new lands being discovered, and on their travels collected things they found interesting.

They were consumed by beauty, and gathered up bundles of flowers to fill English gardens: poppies and stocks from France; white jasmine from Catalonia; daffodils from Mount Carmel; tulip trees and a mimic passion flower from North America; as well as vegetables such as cos lettuce, plums, scarlet runner beans and possibly the first pineapple in England. In 1630, John Tradescant senior became Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms. When he died, his son took over the role.

The Tradescants’ other great contribution to cultural life in England was their museum. They had amassed so many treasures while seeking out colourful plants that they decided, in 1626, to open up their home, Turret House, to the public. They called it The Ark and began charging people 6d to see the things that they had found in the New World and Europe. These treasures were things few people in England had ever seen before, and The Ark was described as a place ‘where a Man might in one daye behold and collecte into one place more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travell’. The collection included plants, a chameleon, a pelican, cheese, an ape’s head, shells, the hand of a mermaid, stones, coins, a toad-fish, birds from India – even a dodo, which at the time was not yet extinct.

My favourite thing in The Ark is Powhatan’s mantle, a coat belonging to the chief of the Native American Indian tribe that lived in Virginia when the first settlers arrived. Powhatan’s daughter was Pocahontas, and she married the leader of the English settlers, John Smith. Perhaps Tradescant senior collected it when he went there in 1637, almost certainly at the king’s request. He made three trips to Virginia and brought back all kinds of flowers, plants, shells and treasures including Tradescantia virginiania, a plant that still grows in England today.

The Tradescants had a catalogue printed, Musaeum Tradescantianum, which was the first of its kind in Britain. It listed the objects in their collection, divided into sections like ‘shell-Creatures, Insects, Mineralls, Outlandish-Fruit’, ‘Utensills, House-holdstuffe’ and ‘rare curiosities of Art’. Everything was given equal weight, even things that were made up, like mermaids and unicorns.

Powhatan’s coat was catalogued in the ‘Garments, Vestures, Habits and Ornaments’ chapter, and described as ‘Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit, all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke’. There were other things from Virginia too – a habit of bearskin and a match-coat made of raccoon skins. Just below these in the list were ‘Henry the 8, his stirrups, hawkes hods and gloves’ and, further down, ‘Edward the Confessor’s knit gloves’.

Both the Tradescants were buried in the churchyard at St Mary at Lambeth. Today the church is the Museum of Garden History, the first museum in the world dedicated to gardening. If you visit the collection you will see the tomb in the knot garden outside the museum. It is decorated with objects from the Tradescants’ collection. Legend has it that if you dance around it 12 times as Big Ben strikes, a ghost will appear. On the tomb is a poem probably written by John Aubrey describing the Tradescants, who:

… Liv’d till they had travelled Orb and Nature through, As by their choice Collections may appear, Of what is rare in land, in sea, in air, Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) A world of wonders in one closet shut…

Their ‘world of wonders’ passed eventually, and controversially, into the hands of Elias Ashmole, who gave it to the University of Oxford. The Tradescant Ark was opened as the Ashmolean Museum, in Broad Street, Oxford, in 1683. It was the first purpose-built public museum in the world.

There were three floors in the museum. The Ark collection was on display on the top floor, along with other natural history artefacts. The ground floor was used for lectures and teaching, and the basement was a laboratory. All the original signs above the doorways on each floor are there, explaining what each room was used for.

Today, The Ark and the Ashmolean Museum have moved across the city of Oxford, and the original Ashmolean building has been taken over by the Museum of the History of Science. When they renovated the building in 1999, they lifted the floorboards on the first floor. Beneath them were all kinds of treasures from the original museum.

When the first discovery was made, the current museum curators joined the builders in digging up these secrets. They felt like ‘floorboard archaeologists’, sifting through dust rather than the earth. They pulled out all kinds of simple things, most of them dating from the eighteenth century, rather than from the very beginning of the museum in 1683.

The ephemera they pulled out of the dust includes: the label from the key that belonged to Dr Plot, keeper of the museum; a letter from J. Chapman, who worked there; labels from portraits; a lizard; a book cover; the remains of a posy of flowers; and an unopened letter -which they aren’t going to open. I’m not sure how they can resist. I liked a small house, cut out of paper, made by someone daydreaming while at the museum, and a sketch of ‘Edward’, a keeper of the museum, with a little flower drawn beneath him.

There are things which whoever dropped them must have been upset to lose – a ring; a penknife and a child’s tooth with a hole drilled through it which had probably been tied on to a string as a keepsake. Perhaps the child’s father or mother wore it and crawled around on the floor of the museum looking for it when it fell off the string.

The most everyday things are the eighteenth-century pencil sharpenings and cherry stalks – very mundane at the time, but fascinating now. There are also lots of wax seals and coins. All of these tiny treasures that fell out of people’s pockets or off the walls, or slipped off tables, have survived by chance. They weren’t supposed to have made it into the twenty-first century, but that they did gives us a lovely feel for life in Britain’s first museum. Everything suggests a human touch. These things aren’t on display, because they’re fragile and utterly unique. They’re the only physical memories of the first museum in Britain.

Now, there are around 2,500 museums in Britain, and more than 55,000 museums in the world, each with unique collections; and most of the items in these collections are kept behind the scenes. More than 100 million people visit museums in Britain each year. I wonder what the Tradescants would have made of that? When they opened The Ark in their home in Lambeth, I bet they couldn’t have imagined the trend they were starting.

[John Tradescant the elder (c.15705–1638) and John Tradescant the younger (1608–62)] The two Tradescants, father and son, were gardeners with a shared passion for interesting plants and strange curiosities.

[Turret House, Lambeth, London] The Tradescants filled their home with so many curious treasures that they decided to charge the public to come and have a look. They called the first public museum in Britain ‘The Ark’.