In 1929, Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov travelled to Central Asia on one of the many seed-collecting expeditions that took him to five continents over more than two decades. In what is now present-day Kazakhstan, Vavilov the father of modern seed banks found forests of wild fruits and numerous cultivated varieties. Around the city of Alma Ata, he was astonished by the profusion of apple trees, writing in his journal that he believed he had "stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple, where wild apples were difficult to even distinguish from those which were being cultivated."
Correctly surmising that this region of Kazakhstan was "the chief home of European fruit trees," Vavilov collected the seeds of the many varieties of apple and other trees, eventually hauling them back to his scientific base in Leningrad, now St Petersburg.
The trees that sprouted from those seeds, and more than 5,000 other varieties of fruits and berries, now grow in a sprawling, 1,200-acre collection of fields about 32 kilometres south of St Petersburg, not far from the opulent, 18th-century tsarist palace of Pavlovsk. This living repository of trees and bushes, with Europe's most extensive collection of fruits and berries, has been at the centre of a dispute in recent months, as a federal Russian housing agency has tried to confiscate part of the Pavlovsk Research Station to clear the land for upscale dachas for Russia's burgeoning new elite.
The station's fate is now in limbo as after an intense lobbying campaign by botanists and conservation groups around the world, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has announced that the government is investigating the effort to uproot one of the most valuable botanical collections on Earth.
The priceless nature of the Pavlosk Station can be traced directly back to Vavilov and his painstaking efforts to collect seeds from what he viewed as hotspots of plant diversity around the world, now known as Vavilov Centres. His insights into the importance of preserving botanical genetic diversity, particularly among food crops, are highly relevant today, as that diversity faces unparalleled threats from industrial agriculture dominated by monoculture crops, destruction of wild habitats and climate change.
The heatwave and subsequent fires that have destroyed much of Russia's wheat harvest this year may have helped increase the chances that Vavilov's storehouse of plants will live on at Pavlovsk. The fires triggered new fears in Russia about the nation's ability to feed itself and the impact of global warming, and raised the profile of scientists working to protect the country's food varieties. As the heatwave has faded, many are hoping Pavlovsk can be saved.
The Pavlovsk Research Station, part of the NI Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, houses one of the world's largest collections of seeds and planted crops, roughly 90 per cent of which are found in no other scientific collections in the world. The station's inventory includes almost a thousand types of strawberries from more than 40 countries; a similar number of black currant varieties from 30 countries, including North America, Europe and the Far East; 600 apple types collected from 35 countries; and more than a hundred varieties each of gooseberries, cherries, plums, red currants and raspberries.
These old varieties are still needed to provide genes to protect commercial varieties against new threats, ranging from pests to climate change, and to confer new attributes. Such older varieties are mostly held in trust by commercial and international institutions, either in the form of seeds held in cold storage or plantings in places such as Pavlovsk.
The station had seemed destined to fall victim to a drive by the Russian government to free up public land for sale to developers. Pavlovsk is in the St Petersburg suburb of Pushkin and is increasingly surrounded by up-market apartments and holiday homes, in an area made fashionable because of its proximity to Pavlovsk, the palace built by Catherine the Great. In late 2009, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development handed over one-fifth of the station's fields to the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development, which is tasked with finding housing land.
The Vavilov Institute appealed the decision. The case has been rumbling on in the courts ever since. But the Pavlovsk station's director, Fyodor Mikhovich, who has worked there for 32 years, says he was told by one official: "Go to sleep. Just go to sleep. We are taking the land."
A sign at Pavlovsk marks a collection of decorative perennial plants. News that the Pavlovsk station was threatened with a state land grab first emerged over the summer. However, what looked like a done deal has attracted a high-profile international campaign that could be on the verge of success just as the world's governments meet in Japan this week to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity.
Cary Fowler, an American conservationist who runs the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, Italy, visited the station earlier this year. He says the loss of the collection would be "the largest intentional, preventable loss of crop diversity in my lifetime".
It remains unclear how much of the collection will be destroyed by the development. Scientists say three quarters of their "priceless collection" is grown on the 227 acres being demanded for housing. This encompasses all its berries, including its strawberries, red currants, black currants and gooseberries.
The federal real estate fund says the fields are "covered with weeds and mowed grass". But its own report of its visit to the station recently says half the land on one of the two plots they plan to build on is "utilised for berry trees".
In any case, Fowler says the long-term intention is clear. The region's planners have zoned the entire station for development and the land that the federal real estate fund wants to take first is in the middle of the station's fields. "So if they get that, it is only a question of time before the rest of the fields will be taken," Fowler says.
The station is undeniably dilapidated and little plant breeding or research into plant genomes is now carried out there. Stripped of funds since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, parts of the station lie virtually abandoned. In other areas, the staff does little more than maintain the collection of old varieties. Even so, the collection is unique and potentially of great value.
In recent years, nobody has cross-checked the station's plants with other collections outside Russia. "It is possible that some samples are being duplicated elsewhere but most are not," says the director-general of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko.
Nonetheless, international authorities say the collection contains genes of potentially great value in developing new commercial varieties. Many of its varieties are unusually hardy in cold temperatures and disease-resistant.
"It would be a major tragedy if the collection were lost," says one of the world's leading strawberry breeders, Jim Hancock of Michigan State University.
Norman Looney, president of the International Society for Horticultural Science, says the station's collection "represents work performed over more than 150 years and has survived both climatic and political catastrophe. It is the largest such collection in Europe and the only one at this far-north latitude."
Vavilov began collecting plants across Asia in 1916, working first on wheat and other grain crops before moving on to other crops and other continents. Through his travels in the Caucasus, Afghanistan, the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, Japan, China, Korea, the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America, Vavilov realised that cradles of botanical diversity were most often found in mountainous regions, where changes in topography and climate led to the development of diverse species.
The Pavlovsk Station, established in 1926, is one of 11 seed banks that Vavilov created across the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he worked to expand his collections but as the decade wore on, he ran afoul of Joseph Stalin for disputing the views of the quack scientist Trofim Lysenko, who said characteristics acquired through the environment could be inherited. Vavilov was arrested by Stalin's secret police and thrown into the gulag, where he died of starvation in 1943. During the Nazi siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, scientists at Vavilov's institute protected its collections, with some succumbing to starvation rather than consuming the collection's rice and other crops.
Vavilov's successors have continued his work until today, particularly in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where wild berries remain an important part of the local diet.
Should the Russian government move ahead with plans to develop the Pavlovsk Station, scientists are discussing the need for an emergency rescue plan. But there are doubts about how much of the collection could be saved. One option might have been to rush seeds from Pavlovsk to the "doomsday vault" of crop seeds from around the world, which is now being assembled on the Norwegian island of Svalbard in the Arctic. But according to Fowler, few of the fruits and berries held at Pavlovsk produce seeds that would survive freezing. To be saved, they would need to be planted elsewhere, a huge logistical task.
"We will try to help them rescue the station," he said. "We have contacted a number of institutions to alert them that we may need to swing into action at short notice. But there will be little time, there is no place [in Russia] to put the collection and quarantine regulations will prevent us sending it abroad quickly."
The Vavilov Institute claims transfers would take 15 years and cost "several dozens of millions of US dollars."
The international campaign has clearly helped buy time for the station and may ultimately save it. Recently, the federal real estate development fund announced that it had postponed the auction of the first parcel of land, intended for September 23, until at least the end of this month, and had set up an international scientific commission to look into the issue and make recommendations.
"This is a very positive development," says Fowler. "It ensures that decisions will be made with solid scientific input. We really couldn't ask for more."
Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is the author of numerous books, including ‘When the Rivers Run Dry' and ‘With Speed and Violence'.
