A Seedbank for Oxfordshire

Aim

HUSK is building a living Seed Bank for Oxfordshire to safeguard our heritage seeds and strengthen regional biodiversity and resilience

Sow it. Save it.

A Seedbank for Oxfordshire

The privatisation of the water industry has given us failures that are easily visible: polluted rivers, leaks, rising bills.

The privatisation of our seed heritage isn't so visible but it’s equally as real. Varieties disappear quietly, with no protest and no photo opportunity. Garden Organic estimates, that 98% of British vegetable varieties have disappeared over the past century. In addition, there is much concern that many crops from hybrid patented seeds are nutritiously inferior to heritage seeds that is impacting our health.

That’s why at HUSK (Heritage & Unique Seed Ko-op) we’re creating a living seed bank for Oxfordshire - to grow, save, and share our region’s heritage seeds and strengthen biodiversity and resilience. Oxfordshire still holds fragments of a remarkable seed heritage that dates back 2500 years to Persia.

What are Heritage Seeds?

Hidden behind the walls of a dozen of our Oxfordshire historic gardens, are increasingly rare HERITAGE seeds - open-pollinated plant varieties passed down for hundreds of years, carefully saved by generations of gardeners long before industrial agriculture standardised our food. Unlike modern hybrid seeds, these heirloom quince, peas, artichoke etc are genetically stable, perfectly adapted to our local soil, and carry flavours our great-grandparents would instantly recognise.                                          

Yet every year, a few more vanish, taking that irreplaceable local knowledge with them. Hence our agenda to bring twelve walled gardens together into one living seed bank, surveying and saving what we find before it’s lost. Help us make it happen.

- Heritage Seed Walled garden

We're very proud of what we've achieved but there's still room for improvement. HUSK ( Heritage and Unique Seed Ko-op) is run by a mixture of part-time staff & volunteers whose passion drives the project. However, we're in a climate crisis and we need faster solutions. Our team could spend the next few years patiently building up our Seedbank for Oxfordshire, or we could ask you to help us over our financial threshold faster so that we can scale quicker. We've already had a big impact; imagine what we could achieve by scaling!

Led by John Wynne, HUSK is a project of Glyme Valley CIC working with partners such as Garden Organic, Coop, Kew Gardens and Oxford Botanic Garden.

Deadline - £25,435 by Monday 4 January 2026

- Some of our HUSK members 

Where the funds go

Whatever we raise will fund surveys and cataloguing with Garden Organic. If we exceed the target, extra funds will expand the network to more walled gardens, develop apothecary plant collections, and support a heritage recipe book and our ‘Seedpals’ social media platform (it’s like a botanical instagram!) all the way from the Thames to Tehran (where walled gardens began).

The money we receive will go toward three core purposes:

1. Support the physical surveys of twelve walled gardens.

2. ⁠Catalogue the plants found in each walled garden, some of them will be hundreds of years old.

3. ⁠Training our first volunteer seed guardians. 

It will also launch our county seed catalogue:

1. The Oxfordshire Index Seminum - ⁠this is our catalogue comprising all of our seedbanks in West Oxfordshire.

2. SeedPals - this is our new botanical social platform for connecting our diverse members with like-minded people from the Thames to Tehran.

What your gift does:

Every contribution funds real, tangible work, and every entry it pays for becomes part of a repository that keeps growing:

    •    £10 records and photographs a heritage variety into our shared county catalogue.

    •    £25 funds the survey and cataloguing of a single wall or bed, where an unrecorded, or long-lost, cultivar may be waiting.

    •    £50 helps train a volunteer seed guardian with Garden Organic.

    •    £100 collects, cleans and grows on a full season’s seed from one heritage variety, so it can be shared and multiplied.

    •    £250 and above helps establish a complete seed node at a pilot garden, a working store the region can draw on and build up.

- Harvesting an Espalier Pear Tree.

A little bit of info about our goals this year...

We have so many big plans for this next year! Below is a little snippet of the great things we're set to achieve.

• Introduction to the Oxfordshire Index Seminum (Catalogue) as a new biodiversity service for the region
• Working with schools and charities to get children and less able-bodied people out into the countryside
• Working with more community-led projects rather than individual landowners

Get involved:

Visit husk.org.uk to find out more information about what Husk is building!

For any inquires please contact John at [email protected]

You can also scan the QR code below to visit our website

(Each donation will be eligible to claim a reward!)

See below for more details.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 16th December 2026 at 3:11pm