During World War II, as Nazi forces besieged the Russian city of Leningrad, scientists at the city’s famed seed bank made a pact to protect the collection and consume nothing, even if it could have ...

It was then, says the journalist Simon Parkin in his riveting “The Forbidden Garden,” that Vavilov and his colleagues resolved to “repair the damage and build up the vision” of a “living ...

One of the Soviet Union’s finest achievements has gone largely unrecognised. Back in the 1920s, the world’s first seedbank was established in a former palace in Leningrad (the city later ...

The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice Simon Parkin Scribner (2024) After Simon Parkin’s account of the siege of Leningrad and the fate of the ...