The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst place in West Sussex, England is the largest repository of plant genetics resources (PGRs) in the world. Founded in 2000, the MSB functions as a hub for a global partnership program between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and local partners from over 80 countries. According to their self-published institutional history, the MSBP was created to take on the mantle of global biodiversity conservation at a moment of ecological crisis. I study the bio-politics of the recasting of Kew’s role as arbiter of colonial botanical knowledge to keeper of botanical futures through seed banking. While the MSBP is a part of Kew’s vision to stay at the cutting edge of conservation and environmental governance, its relationship to colonial botany and political economy must also be interrogated in the light of new regulations in intellectual property rights. How do institutions deeply implicated in the colonial control over the production and dissemination of knowledge continue to stay relevant in a post-colonial era. How do they maintain their access across less-porous boundaries? With institutional documents and oral histories gathered from founding employees of the MSBP, I revivify the origin story of the MSBP. I investigate Kew Gardens’ ‘rebranding’ as Kew Science and the MSBP to show an example of how one institution in a post-colonial era distinguishes itself from the colonial movement of botanical specimens for economic gains, but is, at the same time, an extension of a long tradition of plant exploration, accumulation, and exchange.
