Rare herb devastated by Australian bush fires saved by seed bank

By Adam Vaughan

Vertigo Films

During the recent unprecedented bush fires in Australia, a single blaze in Cudlee Creek, a small town near Adelaide in South Australia, burned more than 25,000 hectares of land and destroyed numerous homes and vehicles.

One of the largely unnoticed victims of the Cudlee Creek fire was clover glycine (Glycine latrobeana), a rare herb in the pea family that is endemic to South Australia and was listed as vulnerable even before the bush fires. While the amount of the herb lost in Cudlee Creek and elsewhere in the …