A brome lives on: How a British grass escaped extinction

had been found across much of Southern England. But its decline was dramatic. By 1972 it had vanished from its last toehold - two hay fields at Pampisford, near Cambridge. Even the seeds stored at the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens as an insurance policy were dead, having been mistakenly kept at room temperature. Botanists mourned: a unique living entity was, it seemed, gone forever. But one green-fingered botanist prevented its complete demise. At first, Philip Smith was unaware that the scrawny pots of grass on his bench were all that remained of a uniquely British species. But when news of the "extinction" of interrupted brome finally reached him, he decided to astonish his colleagues at a meeting of the Botanical Society in Manchester in 1979, where he was booked to talk about his research on the evolution of the brome grasses. He pretended to believe that interrupted brome was extinct and then he suddenly produced two enormous pots of it.