At its Wakehurst Place garden in West Sussex, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has established the UK home of one of the world's largest conservation projects, the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) partnership, a global project to conserve biodiversity by collecting and preserving seeds. This article describes what the MSB partnership does, how seeds are collected and preserved and how important this work is. Through the MSB's Great Plant Hunt and Save our Seeds projects, schools are directly involved in carrying out research and conservation work offering valuable opportunities for inspiring young scientists. (Contains 3 figures.)