‘Nothing is sacred to them’: the race to save rare plants as Russian troops advance

The Aktovsky canyon, in Buzkyi Gard national nature park in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv oblast, is one of only a handful of places where the rare flower Moehringia hypanica grows in the wild. Photograph: Yuriy Nedopekin/Alamy

In the basement laboratory of the National Dendrological Park Sofiyivka, Larisa Kolder tends to dozens of specimens of Moehringia hypanica between power outages. Just months earlier, she and her team at this microclonal plant propagation laboratory in Uman, Ukraine, received 23 seeds of the rare flower.

Listed as threatened in Ukraine’s Red Book of endangered species, Moehringia grows nowhere else in the wild but the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. Of those 23 seeds, only two grew into plants that Kolder and her colleagues could clone in their laboratory, but now her lab is home to a small grove of Moehringia seedlings, including 80 that have put down roots in a small but vital win for biodiversity conservation amid Russia’s war with Ukraine.