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A handful of 200-year-old seeds discovered inside a red leather-bound notebook at the National Archives in London have been nurtured to life by botanists at the UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens.
Against all odds, experts at Wakehurst Place, in West Sussex, south of the British capital, resurrected three different plant species from the seeds in a recovery effort few had believed would succeed.
The plants, including a shrub called Liparia villosa, a stunning pincushion-like flower called Leucospermum, and a type of acacia, are now growing vigorously, they said.
The survival of the seeds is all the more remarkable for the conditions they have endured since being collected during the Napoleonic wars.
The notebook carries the inscription of Jan Teerlink, a Dutch merchant who according to archive research gathered the seeds during a visit to the Cape of Good Hope in 1803. On his return journey, with a cargo of tea and silk, his Prussian vessel Henriette was captured by the British navy and all documents, including his notebook, were seized and passed to the high court of admiralty.
Some time later, the notebook was handed to the Tower of London and later still to the the National Archives, where it lay undisturbed until curators stumbled across it recently while carrying out cataloguing improvements.
The notebook was examined by Roelof van Gelder, a guest researcher from the Royal Dutch Library, who discovered 40 tiny packets tucked inside containing 32 different species of seeds. Most were labelled with Latin names, but others were apparently unidentifiable at the time and bore such tags as “Unknown mimosa”, “Seeds from a tree with crooked thorns” and “Seeds of the wild melons eaten by the savages along the Orange river”.
To attempt to revive the seeds, a few of each variety were given to ecologists at the Millennium Seed Bank.
They were then transferred to a jelly-like medium to see if they would grow. The team now has two shrubs around 10cm high and the acacia is nearly at waist height.
