There are big changes in Russia, in how their economy operates. If the Nikolai Vavilov Research Institute is defunct, then there is no one taking care of the garden. Russia is not a land-poor country, they could put the new housing someplace else. Its really up to them to organize and fund their university system.

Yeah... I would assume they could move everything to another spot. Probably what *should* happen. Lets hope it does. I'm sure there is a lot of neat stuff in that collection and most (all) would be hardy to areas like mine.

thats a real great shame, i would love to get in there and add to my collection, i find one of the problems with places like that is they could possibly fund by making plants available at cost to the public, we have somthing like this in the uk and i have contacted them on more than a couple occaisions for help on providing rare sorts of fruit material to me ( which i would gladly pay more for and preserve and in turn make available) and at best disintrested in providing,and wouldnt help, the good side of the story is i contacted the u.s, germplasm reprositery in corvallis and they were only too happy to help me out in my quest, lets hope these plants find there way in to the right hands, maybe corvallis could find a place for them if they havent already got all them varieties least they would be made available in the future,
stew

I followed the link above to read more about this story. It upset me so badly that I have been trying to think of any way that people could have some influence that might prevent the destruction of these plants. I wrote an email to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack asking that our government try to exert some influence to preserve these plants.

When I was a kid my grandmother told me stories about when the chestnut blight killed all the American Chestnut trees in the eastern US. One fungal disease managed to decimate one of the most important trees in the forests of the eastern US. In a matter of a few years, a tree, which was as common in forests as oak trees are today, were all completely dead. Because the wood was naturally disease and rot resistant, the dead tree stood for years until people gradually cut them down for timber. They stood like skeletons to remind them of what had been lost. The trees had provided a tremendous source of nutrition for humans, livestock, and wildlife as well as one of the best lumber materials available.

I live in Knoxville, TN at the foot of the Great Smokey Mountains. For the past 20 years, the hemlock woolly adelgid had been repeating this same story as it kills all of the hemlock trees in the Great Smokey Mountains. Scientists are predicting that all all hemlocks in the southern U.S will be dead within 10 years. We never know when a new pest or disease will come along and wipe out a species or variety of plant upon which we depend. It is imperative that organizations with collections of plants, like the ones at the Pavlovsk experimental station, be preserved so that we have genetic diversity upon which we can develop new variates that will be resistant to plant diseases of the future.

I am going to start putting together a list of URLs and email address for sending comments to press, government, and other groups to see if anything can be done to convince the Russian government that they need to build elsewhere. If I put this list together of URLs and email addresses, how many people would volunteer to send notes to them all. You could write a one simple note to them all, but it is not as simple as sending a group email with blind carbon copies. More and more often groups are using web pages where you must post your comments to them, rather than having a public email address. For these you have to click, paste, and send to each one.

Besides agreeing to send to the list I can put together, everyone that is interested could send the list to friends that are fellow gardeners for example. If a few dozen influential people get a few thousand emails, something might happen to prevent this catastrophe.

The alternative to preserving this plant genetic diversity is that soon we will all be held hostage by a few large corporations who will hold the patents on every plant that is grown for food or fiber, and these plants will depend upon their company's patented chemicals to...

Read "Pomegranate Roads" by a Soviet botanist who followed Vavilov, working mainly in Turkmenistan, and see his account of the basic abandonment of that station and its vast collection there.

Note though that the famous early-20th Century American economic botanist David Fairchild along with others had a fruit collection in Fairfax, VA, which is now a suburb of DC, and that collection met the same fate. Fairchild's paw paw collection was one loss. We can't point fingers or "tsk tsk" too sanctimoniously.

No, I didn't intend to imply that our government was any better. It is U.S. move toward corporate-farming that is perhaps most to blame for our over-dependence upon a mono-culture of only one species or variety of everything. Our gov and industry are both to blame.

I was just hoping the Russians might be smarter than us/US. Bob Rodale (of the Rodale Institute) must be turning over in his grave. In 1990 Rodale was in Russian trying to help them develop a network of regional publications on sustainable agriculture. By its nature organic practices are dependent upon local growers sharing knowledge about what works and what does not in a local environment. Sadly he died in a auto accident while trying to establish this effort to help Russian farmers.