I have been growing rhubarb commercially for over 65 years. I keep a small collection of Australian commercial perennial varieties. The purpose of this is to collect and distribute the seed. However, some well-known types such as ”Sydney Crimson”, a long past New South Wales favourite, has had just no interest in it for a long time. I will have to destroy it, as it is just too much work with my limited time, to maintain it. Over time, I have seen many well-known and marvellous varieties lost forever, as the commercial growers retired, sold their land, or just lost interest, and went on to more profitable crops. Just recently, near me, a tightly held magnificent clone was almost lost after the commercial farm was inundated by floods.
How to long term preserve these types is a problem I have pondered for some time! Rhubarb collections are held in various Botanical Gardens and Research facilities worldwide, but without exception, they are all winter deciduous types - no worthwhile perennial collections exist. The winter deciduous collections successes wax and wane, as funding dries up, labels get mixed up, lost, or people in charge retire, move on, or just lose interest.
What is the answer to this problem?
The answer to this problem is only 1383 km from the North Pole, situated near the town of Longyearbyen, on the island of Spitzbergen, part of the Svalbard collection of Islands. Tunnelled 100 metres into a permanently frozen mountain, it is the SVALBARD GLOBAL SEED VAULT! Here seeds of 1.5 million different varieties of the world’s food crops are stored at –18°C. At the time of writing, 197 different rhubarb types are recorded as being stored there. Often called the “Doomsday” vault, it will protect and preserve the world’s food seeds for eternity. The seeds would be able to be withdrawn following calamities, including nuclear explosions, of which the Vault will withstand a direct hit.
I visited the vault in 2023, a very difficult thing to do, as Longyearbyen is about as far away from Australia as you can get. It’s only open for one or two days each year, and virtually impossible to gain an invite. It’s in Polar Bear territory, and you must be accompanied by an armed guard to protect you from the Bears. Just to add to the difficulties, and to discourage tourists, they made the car park tiny and impossible for buses to park. But it is an incredible place, and will protect and store our precious rhubarb varieties for the foreseeable future.
So we solved that problem, and I’ve been there, done that.
Time to move on to other things.
Colin