Darren Reidy

THE MAN IN charge of logging each native seed in Ireland has described the project as like “Noah’s Ark” for plants – a vault for renewal after ecological disasters. Conservation ecologist Darren Reidy has been researching, gathering and banking native seeds across Ireland since his appointment in 2022. ‘Banking’ the seeds of a native Irish plant is complicated – ideally you would need 10,000 seeds per species. If the plant is endangered, an assessment of all populations on the island is done to decide if it is safe to bank the species’ seeds, and if it is, they can take only 10% of the fruit. Reidy gave the example of critically endangered whitebeam trees that grow only in Ireland. “We only have five individuals of this species on the entire island, and they all occur in Killarney National Park in Kerry,” he said. “Only one of them is producing fruit. So this summer, I travelled to Killarney to collect fruit.