A Native orchid

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the Northern Marsh Orchids are strutting their stuff. It must be summertime!

Seeds of the Northern Marsh Orchid Dactylorhiza purpurella are one of the many species held in Kew's Millennium Seed Bank based at Wakehurst in West Sussex.

The MSB team initially aimed to store seeds from all of the UK's native plant species. It has now achieved this, apart from a handful of species that are either very rare or whose seeds are particularly difficult to store. It also set the goal of banking seeds from 10% of the world's flora by 2010. This was achieved in 2009 when it banked seeds from the 24,200th species, a pink wild banana from China (Musa itinerans) which is an important staple food for wild Asian elephants. The aim for the next phase of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP) is to conserve 25% of the world's plant species by 2020.