The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) at Wakehurst, established in 2000 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is the world’s most diverse collection of frozen plants. Presented as a global hub for biodiversity conservation—a response to ecological crisis—the bank necessitates a critical interrogation of its institutional lineage. By revivifying the project’s origin story, this talk analyzes the biopolitics underlying Kew’s transition from arbiter of colonial botanical knowledge to keeper of global botanical futures through seed banking. While Kew positions the MSB as the cutting edge of modern conservation, its operations must be scrutinized in the context of post-colonial boundaries, new intellectual property rights regulations, and the history of botanical control.