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nafex - [nafex ibiblio list] Nick Bottner's collection

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  • From: david.maxwell@dal.ca
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [nafex ibiblio list] Nick Bottner's collection
  • Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:16:11 -0400

Nick has apparently decided to quit. His property, with trees, beasts, and
beautiful house is
advertised for sale. This raises a significant question, which harkens back
to a posting I
made a week or two ago: what is going to happen to his collection, which is
billed as "the
largest private collection in the Milky way". He has something in the order
of 4000 cultivars.
Compare this with the Geneva repository, who apparently have about 1500.
That is, there
are about 2500 cultivars in Nick's orchard that do not even exist in the
official government
germplasm repository. With luck somebody will buy Nick's place who will
maintain the
collection. But there is a real risk that some rich developer or something
could buy it and
bulldoze the whole thing, with the loss of all this material.

I am in Canada and am prohibited from importing anything from the States.
(This is a whole
'nother issue which is not germane here.) But I wonder whether NAFEX could
take on as a
really valuable project the preservation of this germplasm, (since government
is unlikely to be
either able or willing to do so, else they would have done it before now.)
If each member
agreed to take, say 10 different cultivars to act as a repository of those
particular ones, we
could disseminate the whole collection in a distributed network. We would
need to keep a
central record of who has what, and it would probably be a very good idea to
farm out each
cultivar to at least two different guardians. But I would suggest that this
would constitute a
really worthwhile purpose for the organisation. Thoughts?




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