The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege

"This book made me cry! I’m a botanist myself, so I’ve known the story of the botanists of Leningrad for many years. But this is a beautifully told and brilliantly researched book about what happened to the world’s first seed bank during the Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War. Leningrad was under siege for almost 900 days. In the first winter there was no food, and millions of people starved to death from this blockade. But the scientists who were looking after the seed bank protected the plant materials in the seed bank and didn’t eat them. They saved the seeds and tubers because they saw them as the future of agriculture. There’s quite a lot about plant breeding in this book. About how we use wild species to improve our crops, which, actually, was in part started by Nicolai Vavilov, the plant scientist who founded the seed bank. He was imprisoned by the Stalinist regime and starved to death in prison. He was an extraordinary man, and apparently a very charismatic one, who was whisked away from a plant collecting expedition in the Crimea and put in jail. “You cannot separate science from society. In 100 years time, someone will look back on and think—my goodness, why did they do that?” This was a man trying to save Soviet agriculture, and the people who worked with him were also so dedicated to this mission that many of them died during the siege of Leningrad. You know, the question I asked myself when I finished this book was: What would I have done? For me, the message of the book is that science is full of leaps of understanding, but it is also full of moral decisions. And these decisions are not talked about so much. The bit that made me cry came right at the end. There’s a table that goes on for several pages with the names of all the people who worked at the institute during the siege and what happened to them. Some died of starvation, or from being shelled, or died on the front. Some people lived until the 1980s, so there was a lot of first-hand testimony. I really loved this book. And scientists are often portrayed as only men! Great men making big decisions. But I think these are the people who should never be forgotten. They are not people who published a lot of papers, nor people credited with big discoveries. But they are the people who served this first seed bank that is the precursor of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew and the Global Seed Vault on Svalbard, those places that are looking after seeds for future generations. Leningrad was the first, and it was saved due to the bravery, courage, and dedication of those people, many of them women—because the men had been sent to the front."