This is a term that I have bandied about the past couple years, one I wrote a bit about in a recent post, “The 2024 Plan”, and I think its time I more rigorously define what I mean by the phrase. To phrase it differently: What the hell is a living seed bank? And why am I trying to create one? I am far from the first person to come up with the idea of a seed bank, including a seed bank for prairie plants. Last year I received some seed from the USDA Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). At the time I had plans to engage in a small research project with my friends at South Dakota State University (SDSU) to compare different sources of several milkvetches (Astragalus sp.) that grow in my native prairies. While I found that, on the one hand, I am unsuited to planning, creating an experimental design and following through on a field research project, I still learned something. The seeds, which came from Kansas, Colorado, Montana and Alberta grew into seedlings very different from those grown from my seed. While they may have been the same species they were not the same plants. Their phenotypes, the visible representation of their genetics, were distinct enough to make me wonder if they really were the same species. This is no revelation; many species get divided into several or many subspecies to reflect distinct populations. It drove home for me, however, that I needed to wrap my head around the concept of local adaptation. And then to take that realization further to realize that there might be a place in the world for multiple, complementary seed banks.

I have written before about my travails in receiving ill adapted seed from purchases I have made that established populations in the restorations and then disappeared over several years as the hard winters or other factors took their toll. The blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata), which turned out to be from Colorado, that I planted had a very different phenotype than my natives; it was larger, bloomed earlier and had a gaudier flower. By the second year of the restoration I had carpets of beautiful blossoms, but by the third and fourth years most had died and there were only scattered survivors, likely complaining to each other about the horrible cold they had just lived through. Surviving plants may have been from purchased seed that had tougher genetics or they may have grown from seed that I gathered from my surrounding relict prairies which had the required genetics. Less dramatically I have had the same experience with alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii) and purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea) other wildflowers common in my hills for which I planted both purchased and gathered seed.

It gets worse. Of the approximately 100 species of wildflowers that inhabit my rolling hills, I can purchase seed for about half from regional vendors. Very simple math reveals that about 50 species are totally unavailable from any source except gathered seed. When you add the opaque nature of the source of purchased seed it means that most prairie restorations created from that purchased seed are “dumbed down” versions of what a prairie could be. Some organizations, notably The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have tried to go down a different path starting from gathered, local seed, But a lot of seedings done by nonprofits and public agencies alike are assemblages of 30 or 40 easily accessible species, picked for a combination of availability, cost and perhaps the showiness of their flowers. What are we missing? In the largest context, what are we missing?

For one thing, we are missing plants that may have obligate partnerships with insects, fungi and other life. If the proper nectar sources aren’t available (think monarchs and milkweed) we will be missing their partners. Suzanne Simard has become famous documenting the commensual relationships between mychorrizal fungi and trees, coining the term “the wood-wide web”, showing that the whole is more than a sum of its parts. One plus one plus one, metaphorically, might equal four. or sometimes eight. Life is obviously a lot more complicated that our poor limited imaginations realize, Another thing we miss is redundancy; perhaps there are several species that do a particular job, who can fill a certain niche. However, if we only planted one of those species, and it fails to establish a population, we will miss out on that particular ecosystem service. If we only have a couple species of legumes planted, and they don’t establish good populations, the entire prairie will be short of nitrogen. If we lose our early blooming flowers the native bees have no food. If we don’t have violets we don’t have food for regal frittilary larvae. Some types of mycorhizzal fungi are likely specific to certain species. You get the idea.

It gets worse. I live in an area with native pastures. Because of hills and rocks and potholes, some areas have a lot of native pasture. There is a ridge just west of me that has perhaps 100-200,000 acres of almost contiguous native grass, but between overgrazing, herbicides and invasive brome competition there is a paucity of native wildflowers. The mostly native pasture that housed our little herd of dairy cows while I was growing up has less than 10% of the wildflower population it had back then. That large block of native grass I referred to is mostly a large block of invasive non-native grasses and a few weedy forbs, some native and some not. It is not prairie, just as the 50 acre pasture that I gathered pasqueflowers and dug breadroots on is not really prairie anymore. This means that resupply of prairies from nearby native sources is often unlikely. While few of these species are endangered, or even threatened, they are not easy to get ones hands on when looking for a source to plant in a restoration.

My response is documented in this blog, 230 acres put back to grass, 140 acres of which have 100-175 species planted. I feel there’s more that can come from this little hill farm, however. If a significant barrier to prairie restorations is a source of adapted seed, it could be a repository of possibilities, not just for myself, but for others. If my seed, the genetic answers residing on our farm, are adapted to a 100-150 mile circle, a fairly conservative number, that gives an area of 31,400-80,000 square miles for which it could confidently be used as a seed source. How many acres of restoration can this supply every year? Not that many. However as a supplement to purchased seed, as a source for others to begin new populations, as a touchstone for others engaging in restorations and as an example of particular genotypic answers that evolution has devised to the question of “Who gets to live in the prairie hills in northeast South Dakota?” I think the value can be magnified, it can scale.

That leads to the obvious next question. How can I help it to be magnified, to scale, to enlarge beyond a couple hundred acres? I cannot build it into the GRIN network and database, which is nationwide. However, perhaps I can network with others in this backwater of the world to cooperate in the development of a true seed bank, or seed exchange. Pursuant to the connections that are yet to be established I have already begun work to continue to strengthen and diversify the forb component in my prairies, hoping to progress from it being “neat” that I have twenty or thirty plants of, say, slender milkvetch (Astragalus flexuosus) to having two or three hundred plants that can accomplish two related tasks. First, they can be a robust, self sustaining population which can develop in an evolutionary sense along with the plants in my native prairies. And then it can be a source of seed for other who wish to use it in a restoration or to enhance an existing prairie. That population can also be gathered to be part of a stored seed bank, which can be housed separately from me, and be available for further increase, or use in research. All seed banks need periodic grow out to renew the seed vigor of their collections. My prairies can be that source for what I hope becomes 100 or more species without the need to grow in a dedicated plot. In effect, it can be the seed bank, living and growing in the world to help, supplement and augment a traditional seed bank.

Thus, my choices of where to use my time and resources will be guided not just by the general ecosystem services that a diverse prairie as a whole can contribute, but by the sometimes unknown benefits of all the individual species. Though I may not know the benefits of humble plants like yellow sundrops (Calylophus serrulatus) or bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata), I will attempt to gather, spread, increase and have them available as a seed source. I choose those two species specifically because I have not yet been able to increase them in my restorations, but I hope to. Because all resources, whether time, financial, energy or even space to plant everything, are by nature finite, I will still target my efforts to those species that are more difficult to get, and less likely to have a source within 150-200 miles from here. While those plants grow I can continue to explore how to take this show on the road.