Northernmost "Cold Hardy" Eucalyptus: 78ºN

Eucalyptus will survive Doomsday

or the funny story of E. largiflorens becoming the Northernmost Eucalypt in the World

The Norwegian Government inaugurated yesterday the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the remote Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic Circle, receiving shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries.

Fig. 1: Entrance to the Global Seed Vault at Longyearbyen (Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway)

Current deposits range from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato; but also include representatives of important trees used worldwide as sources of firewood, timber or raw fibre as Acacia, Pinus and Eucalyptus.

Fig. 2: Genus Eucalyptus represented at the Global Seed Vault (Click to see Seed List; or click to see Full Seed List)

This “fail-safe” facility, dug deep into the frozen rock of an Arctic mountain, will secure for centuries, or longer, the most comprehensive and diverse collection of hundreds of millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today.

As well as protecting against the daily loss of plant diversity, the vault could also prove indispensable for restarting agricultural production at the regional or global level in the wake of a natural or man-made disaster. Contingencies for climate change have been worked into the plan. Even in the worst-case scenarios of global warming, the vault rooms will remain naturally frozen for up to 200 years.

Fig. 4: Eucalyptus largiflorens, first Eucalyptus at latitude 78ºN

500 seeds of Eucalyptus largiflorens donated by the International Livestock Research Institute of Ethiopia travelled from Adis Ababa to Norway to become the Northernmost "Cold Hardy" Eucalyptus in the world (until we convince Sir Richard Branson to help us drop a seed packet near the North Pole!)

Even if just 1 of several hundred Eucalyptus taxa is represented by now at the Svalbard Global Seed Ark, these plants naturally prone to resurrection after surviving natural disasters, the ubiquitous Australian Gum Trees, are finally safe from Apocalypse in the permafrost of the Doomsday Vault.

Curious links

An intrepid plantsman photographs what is possibly the northernmost flowering Eucalyptus in the world not very far away from Spitsbergen. A blooming E. dalrympleana... in the fjords of Norway!

Northernmost flowering Eucalyptus: E. dalrympleana at 61ºN

GIT's Eucalyptology Topics

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© 2008 Gustavo Iglesias Trabado. Please contact us if you want to use all or part of this text and photography elsewhere. We like to share, but we do not like rudeness.