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Wakehurst Place

Wakehurst Place is a National Trust property located near Ardingly, West Sussex in the High Weald of southern England, comprising a late 16th-century country house and a mainly 20th-century garden, managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who also have a research facility there. Visitors are able to see the gardens, the historic house, and also visit the research centre. For the National Trusts 2008–2009 fiscal year Wakehurst Place Garden was the Trusts most visited property for which admission was charged, with 439,627 visitors. The house rated an illustration in Joseph Nash, The Mansions of England in the Olden Time . The garden today covers some 2 square kilometres and includes walled and water gardens, woodland and wetland conservation areas. It was largely created by Gerald Loder who purchased the estate in 1903 and spent 33 years developing the gardens. He was succeeded by Sir Henry Price, under whose care the Loder plantings matured, Sir Henry left Wakehurst Place to the nation in 1963 and the Royal Botanic Gardens took up a lease from the National Trust in 1965. Wakehurst is home to the National Collections of Betula, Hypericum, Nothofagus and Skimmia. The Great Storm of 1987 decimated Loders plantings, toppling 20,000 trees. Since then, Kew has redesigned the gardens to create a walk through the temperate woodlands of the world. The Wellcome Trust Millennium Building, which houses an international seed bank known as the Millennium Seed Bank, was opened in 2000. The aim of the Millennium Seed Bank is to collect seeds from all of the UKs native flora and conserve seeds from 25% of the worlds flora by 2020, in the hope that this will save species from extinction in the wild. Wakehurst Place is home to the largest growing Christmas tree in England, a giant redwood. The tree stands 35m tall and is lit with around 1,800 lights from Advent until Twelfth Night. The lightbulbs on the tree were changed in 2006 to energy-saving lightbulbs, so the tree is not as bright as before but uses less energy.

Millennium Seed Bank Partnership

The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, formerly known as the Millennium Seed Bank Project, is an international conservation project coordinated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. After being awarded a Millennium Commission grant in 1995 the project commenced in 1996 and is now housed in the Wellcome Trust Millennium Building situated in the grounds of Wakehurst Place, West Sussex. Its purpose is to provide an "insurance policy" against the extinction of plants in the wild by storing seeds for future use. The storage facilities consist of large underground frozen vaults preserving the worlds largest wild-plant seedbank or collection of seeds from wild species. The project had been started by Dr Peter Thompson and run by Paul Smith after the departure of Roger Smith. Roger Smith was awarded the OBE in 2000 in the Queens New Year Honours for services to the Project. In collaboration with other biodiversity projects around the world expeditions are sent to collect seeds from dryland plants. Where possible, collections are kept in the country of origin with duplicates being sent to the Millennium Seed Bank Project for storage. Major partnerships exist on all the continents, enabling the countries involved to meet international objectives such as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations Environment Programme. The seed bank at Kew has gone through many iterations. The Kew Seed Bank facility, set up by Peter Thompson in 1980, preceded the MSBP and was headed by Roger Smith from 1980 to 2005. From 2005 Paul Smith took over as head of the MSBP. The Wellcome Trust Millennium Seed Bank building was designed by the firm Stanton WIlliams and opened by Prince Charles in 2000. The laboratories and offices are in two wings flanking a wide space open to visitors housing an exhibition, and also allowing them to watch the work of cleaning and preparing seeds for storage through the large windows of the work areas. There is also a view down to the entrance to the underground vaults where the seeds are stored at  20 °C. In 2001, the international programme of the MSBP was launched. In April 2007, it banked its billionth seed, the Oxytenanthera abyssinica, a type of African bamboo. In October 2009, it reached its 10% goal of banking all the worlds wild plant species by adding Musa itinerans, a wild banana, to its seed vault. As estimates for the number of seed bearing plant species have increased, 34,088 wild plant species and 1,980,405,036 seeds in storage as of June 2015 represent over 13% of the worlds wild plant species.
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