I am an artist and want to use seeds as subjects for my work

First, if you are an artist or photographer working for the press, please contact Kew’s PR office (pr@kew.org).

The many commitments of staff at the Millennium Seed Bank mean that we have only a limited amount of time for direct collaboration with artists and providing seeds for art projects. However, we ourselves are constantly delighted and inspired by the enormous variety of form shown by seeds and fruits and we want to do as much as possible to give artists access to that diversity.
So, in the first instance we hope to satisfy most artists' needs by providing this gallery of seed images and there is also a gallery of Images of seed X-rays.
You may use the images as inspiration for private artwork.  But please remember, all of the images are the copyright of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and you are not permitted to use them for anything other than private study (which would include making pictures of the seeds for your own personal enjoyment).  Please also see the Terms and Conditions of Use of Kew's website, which sets out the permitted uses of the images.  You may not use the images as the basis for art which is used in any kind of commercial context, for example, which is included in a book or which is displayed in a public exhibition, unless you have agreed a specific collaboration with us in advance.

Moreover, we would not hold these seeds in our collection, nor be able to work on them, without the co-operation of our network of Partners around the world. Please give appropriate acknowledgement in any presentation of your work, both of RBG Kew, and our Partners in the MSB Project. The source of seed is given on each image.

The images in the gallery are a selection from a growing number of digital photographs of seeds, arising from studies on the collections by our Seed Morphologist, Wolfgang Stuppy and his team. These are published on this website, via our Seed Information Database. It is not particularly easy to browse the full set of images in SID (hence we have made the gallery), but follow the instructions–below.

In addition, once a year at "The Big Draw" event, seeds are made available at the Seed Bank for use by the public. This usually takes place in October. There may be other similar opportunities at other times during the year.
Before approaching us about closer collaboration, please familiarize yourself with the procedures and requirements of organizations such as The Wellcome Trust , National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and The Gulbenkian Foundation, all of whom have supported ‘sci-art’ and/or ‘artist in residence’ projects in the past. We would need a similar level of preparation before we could consider any application, and preferably firm ideas on potential funding.

As an example, we have had a very successful collaboration with Prof. Rob Kesseler from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, which led to the publication "Seeds - Time Capsules of Life". The book, both an innovative "Sci-Art-Adventure" and the first illustrated popular-scientific natural history of seeds, is based upon and woven around the Millennium Seed Bank Project, to the benefit of both the artist's and our work.

 

 

 

Instructions for accessing SID images.

Open the following page:
/data/sid/sidsearch.html
Then tick the small tick-box towards the bottom of the page on the right, labelled 'Morphology'; don't enter anything in any other box.

Press 'Search' button; and SID will return (could be a bit slow, be patient) a list of species for which we have recorded morphological data, including images - indicated by 'Morph' in pink type at the end of each record.

To view the images for each, you have to click on the link (blue-underlined) for each record, and SID will return all the data for that species. You will need to scroll down towards the bottom for the morphological data, and at the botom of that section you will see the links to the images, with names like 'S-LS' (short for 'seed - longitudinal section'), for instance, indicating the image orientation.

Click each of these in turn to download the images. These images are only at low resolution, primarily intended for screen display. If you need a particular image at higher resolution, please contact us.