Native pea seeds flown back from London in 2020 as part of rescue mission for endangered plants hit by bushfires
Clover glycine (glycine latrobeana) seeds returned from Kew Gardens bank in London would be used to give the plant a chance of surviving the Adelaide Hills 2019 bushfires.
South Australia flew rare native seeds back from a British bank in 2020 to save a species from extinction. Precious native pea seeds collected from the Adelaide Hills 13 years before were brought back from Millennium Seed Bank in Kew Gardens, London, to help revegetate fire-ravaged land in the region.
The international delivery was a tribute to long-term planning. In 2007, more than 1000 of the precious clover glycine seeds were collected from the Mount Lofty Ranges and sent to the seed bank in Kew Gardens. Daniel Duval, a seed biologist at the South Australian Seed Conservation Centre, said the move meant that the rare pea, listed nationally as vulnerable, had a fighting chance of surviving the Mount Lofty Ranges fires from December 2019.
The 250 rescued seeds were to be propagated in an orchard by seed conservation centre biologists and ecologists from Adelaide and Mount Lofty Natural Resources. New seeds collected from the orchard would then be used to grow plants to revegetate the hills around Cudlee Creek.
Daniel Duval also worked on another endangered plant rescue on Eyre Peninsula, another region damaged by intense fires in December 2019. A “translocation trial” was conducted of the endangered Corunna daisy at the Secret Rock Nature Reserve about 50km southeast of Kimba.
This plant was thought to be extinct after first being discovered in the 1800s and not seen again until plants were found in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 8000 to 10,000 of its seeds were stored at the seed bank in the Adelaide Botanic Garden. A orchard yielded 480,000 of its seeds. That resulted in hundreds being planted in a 900-hectare enclosure owned by Ecological Horizons.
Ecological Horizons had already introduced the nationally endangered chalky wattle to the land, with the help of the SA Herbarium and Kimba Area School.
The South Australian Seed Conservation Centre was home to seeds from most of the more than 1000 threatened plant species, or one in four species in the state.
Adelaide Botanic Garden also was raising funds in 2020 to send its seed scientists to the bushfire-ravaged Kangaroo Island to collect and bank seeds from its endangered plants.