Going To Seed...

[ffutures]

I spent the day on a training course which took me to Wakehurst Place in Surrey, one of the sites belonging to the Royal Botanic Gardens. What's notable about Wakehurst, apart from some very nice gardens, is the Millennium Seed Bank Project, which aims to obtain and safeguard the seeds of 24,000 plant species, and is well on its way to achieving that goal. It's an international project that involves seed hunters from all over the world shipping their seeds to Wakehurst, where they are very carefully screened then slowly chilled and dried to extend their dormant period to hundreds of years, then stored in a huge underground bunker.

Visitors to the park can visit the grounds and see quite a lot of the operation from the outside, all of the labs are glass sided, but I was with a technician's group and got to see some of the behind the scenes stuff including some of the vaults. It's an absolutely amazing project which has already helped to reintroduce several species that were extinct in the wild, and will probably do so many more times. It's set up so that any medical etc. discoveries that result from it will benefit the countries that provide the seeds, with all seeds remaining the property of the supplying country. If it wasn't for the fact that I have a brown thumb I'd love to be involved.

But as one does I started to think about the RPG possibilities....

The biggest problem they have is that a lot of the seeds come in with contaminants; fungus and other parasites, insects, the occasional lizard, etc. Bear in mind that the whole laboratory complex is a sealed quarantine zone. I don't think that the place is set up to automatically lock down if someone hits a panic button, but that needn't stop anyone from putting that into a game. Say something like The Andromeda Strain, only with some sort of evil fungus spore, might be a possibility. Or something that isn't actually a seed might be mistaken for one - think Alien. Or a plant might have some unexpected capabilities - think Triffids. Or something might come in inside one of the sacks of seeds - think Snakes in a Laboratory...

If none of those appeal, how about magical seeds, or interesting adventures collecting the seeds and getting them back to Britain? It's a wonderful plot generator for any sort of modern-day RPG, and there's a lot of information about it on line.

Comments

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Have you heard the BBC radio serial The Destruction Factor The premise is that engineered plant gets out of the lab and starts to grow wild. Unfortunately it's not only fast-growing but it also produces a huge amount of oxygen. People only start to realise that something is going on after a number of housefires in rooms with a new potted plant. Things then become problematic on a country-wide scale.

It's rather good. BBC7 have broadcast it at least once, so it's likely to return there eventually.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

They nicked that one from an old JLA / Swamp Thing crossover comic. It didn't make sense there - plants can't produce more oxygen than the amount of CO₂ they take in and it's only a tiny proportion of the atmosphere - and I very much doubt the BBC have found a way to make it plausible.

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

I did wonder, but being basically a physicist rather than a biologist I didn't think too hard. :)

[armb.livejournal.com]

> interesting adventures collecting the seeds ... modern-day RPG

I can imagine Forgotten Futures scenarios where people collecting specimens for Kew find unexpected things too, if you need an excuse to get people off to exotic parts of the world.
(Hmm - I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Challenger#Early_years that Challenger "resigned after a series of arguments with one of his former tutor, Doctor Illingworth" - I wonder if timill is any relation.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I took great delight in pointing that one out to him - and to Ansible - when I was writing Forgotten Futures III.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add that in most plausible Victorian/Edwardian settings any effort on these lines will lack the conservation street-cred of the modern project. But a LOT of what the Millennium guys are doing builds on the work of naturalists from the 17th century onwards who sent seeds and other specimens to Kew.

[lawbag.livejournal.com]

Our glazing company did all the glass work a few years back, which I understood was damaged during heavy winds.

The glass nature of the structure could act as a beam/magnifier or intensifier for the sun's radiation