The Age of Seeds: How Plants Hacked Time and Why Our Future Depends on It

When a 2000-year-old extinct date palm seed was discovered, no one expected it to still be alive. But it sprouted a healthy young date palm.

That seeds produced millennia ago could still be viable today suggests seeds are capable of extreme lifespans.
Yet many seeds, including those crucial to our everyday lives, don’t live very long at all. In The Age of Seeds Fiona McMillan-Webster tells the astonishing story of seed longevity, the crucial role they play in our everyday lives, and what that might mean for our future.

About the Author:  Fiona McMillan-Webster is a Brisbane-based science writer with a Bachelor of Science in physics and a PhD in biophysics. She has written science stories for National Geographic, Forbes, COSMOS magazine, Australian Geographic, and other publications. Her writing has also appeared in the Best Australian Science Writing anthologies for 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2021. She was runner up for the UNSW Bragg Press Prize for Science Writing 2016.