Guaranteed mother's ruin.
Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:09 am
The future of gin is safe, according to UK horticultural experts who have been working to conserve juniper, the spirit's key ingredient.
The UK National Tree Seed Project announced it had now collected and protected seeds of juniper plants from across the country.
They will be stored in the Millennium Seed Bank in Wakehurst, Sussex.
While gin sales have enjoyed a recent boom, juniper has been threatened by disease.
A deadly fungus, Phytophthora austrocedri, has been particularly damaging for the plants in Scotland, one of the main areas for juniper growth.
Although the seed storage will not cure disease, project managers hope it will aid conservation and stop juniper falling into extinction.
The project is run by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and funded by the People's Postcode Lottery.
Project officer Simon Kallow called it "a type of insurance policy", and said the aim was to make the seed bank active and useful, so that people could use it to conduct research and conservation work.
