Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Between 1941 and 1944, the city of Leningrad was subjected to a brutal siege by Nazi Germany.

Cut off from the outside world and with food and other essentials dwindling,

it's estimated that upwards of one million people died.

Yet throughout this ordeal, a group of indomitable scientists

overcame hunger and injury and risked their

lives to protect the world's first seed bank.

Danny Bird speaks to the writer Simon Parkin about the Plant Institute's pioneering work

and the astonishing fortitude of the men and women who fought to preserve a unique botanical

collection amid unimaginable conditions. How did you first come across this remarkable piece of history?

So I was reading a newspaper article several years ago about a land dispute in the suburbs of

St Petersburg, really scintillating stuff, but the

piece was all about how developers wanted to put up some apartments on this land about 20 miles

outside of St. Petersburg. And there was a big outcry in the scientific community because

this land happened to be owned by the Plant Institute, the world's first seed bank.

And in the 1930s and 40s, the botanists who worked there had planted lots of rare seeds and plants in this particular area.

And so, you know, fast forward to today, and there's lots of very rare trees here, you know, exactly on the place where they wanted to put up these buildings.

So there was a big outcry saying you can't build here. That would be, you know, scientific crime, crime against science.

And there were just a couple of lines in the newspaper articles saying that also during the Second World War,

a team of botanists at the Plant Institute had defended

the seed collection there with their lives while facing starvation. And it was kind of a throwaway

comment, but the sort of thing that as a writer, a journalist or someone who writes stories about

...