Seed and Bulb Exchanges, some Comments
Jane McGary (Sat, 15 Jul 2006 20:31:19 PDT)

Diane Whitehead wrote,

This is not quite true. I was the intake cataloger for this exchange for 3
years in the mid-1990s, so I have experience with its policies. NARGS will
list seed of CITES listed plants and endangered species if the seed is FROM
A CULTIVATED SOURCE (garden collected). I don't remember encountering any
wild collected seed of federally listed endangered species donated to the
exchange. As for state listed species, NARGS does not maintain this
information on its database, as far as I know; and given the strange things
that happen with state listing (particularly the tendency to list outlying
populations of plants that are common in other states), this makes sense to
me. Certainly CITES listing doesn't come into it, as you can see by the
long list of garden-grown Cyclamen seeds on the NARGS seedlist (the whole
genus Cyclamen is CITES listed as a result of overcollecting of tubers from
the wild, mostly in Turkey).

The only seeds discarded by the NARGS exchange are obviously non-viable
ones, rotten ones, those too large to handle (e.g., oak seeds), and a whole
list of noxious weeds -- many of the latter are donated by European members
who classify as "wildflowers" plants that, on introduction to North
America, became "noxious weeds."

Jane McGary