Spurred by the impending completion of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Archiving Eden explores the role of seed banks and of their preservation efforts in the face of a changing climate, the extinction of species and decreasing agricultural diversity. Serving as a global botanical backup system, these privately and publicly funded institutions assure the opportunity to reintroduce a species should a catastrophic event or civil strife affect a key ecosystem somewhere in the world.

Since 2008 Dornith Doherty has worked in collaboration with biologists at the most comprehensive seed banks in the world, among them the United States national centre for genetic resources preservation in Colorado and the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew.

“Many of these images radiate a spiritual dimension, emanating wordlessly like hieroglyphs from nature, seeming to reflect life itself from within the seed.”