During the recent unprecedented bush fires in Australia, a single blaze in Cudlee Creek, a small town near Adelaide in South Australia, burned more than 25,000 hectares of land and destroyed numerous homes and vehicles.
One of the largely unnoticed victims of the Cudlee Creek fire was clover glycine (Glycine latrobeana), a rare herb in the pea family that is endemic to South Australia and聽 even before the bush fires. While the amount of the herb lost in Cudlee Creek and elsewhere in the region is still being assessed, an international effort has already swung into action to help restore it, highlighting the importance of the world鈥檚 network of seed banks.
Twelve years ago, around 1200 clover glycine seeds were sent to the UK to be dried and cooled to -20掳C for storage at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew鈥檚 Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex. Now 250 of them have been withdrawn and sent to the South Australian Seed Conservation Centre to help restore what was lost.
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鈥淚t really does just show seed banks work. They鈥檝e provided that insurance policy. Some people think of them as static places, and this shows when a species is in crisis, you can provide seeds to provide restoration,鈥� says Elinor Breman at the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Clover glycine is found in shady gullies filled with woodlands made up of manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis), a type of eucalyptus tree favoured by koalas. Much of this habitat has already been lost because vegetation has been cleared for farming.
Breman says that although the plant has no intrinsic or medicinal value, it is beautiful and should be restored as it is already threatened and has a very small range, meaning it faces a greater risk from being lost in incidents such as the bush fires.
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