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One of them, a baker called Tobias Fenwick, describes the flour in language usually reserved for wine: it has, he says, ‘a sweetness modern flour has lost, and a nuttiness at the back’. He concedes that it is harder to work with. The dough is slacker and less forgiving, the loaves rise less, and he had to rewrite most of his recipes before he was satisfied. Several of his customers insist that, unlike supermarket bread, it never upsets their stomachs.

Seed banks of this kind are less romantic than their reputation suggests. The great majority of samples are never requested by anyone, and a good number, after decades in storage, have lost the ability to germinate at all. Staff test them periodically, and when a sample’s viability falls too far, a few seeds are grown out to produce a fresh supply, an expensive process that partly explains the bank’s reluctance to part with more.

The network has no website and no funding, and its members disagree about almost everything except the importance of keeping old varieties in the ground and not only in the freezer. A seed bank, Rowe says, is a library; a field is a conversation. Varieties that are grown go on adapting to the conditions around them, and that, she argues, is exactly what a warming climate will demand.

Rowe finds that reversal rather comic, but she is aware that it has a sobering side. If Marlow Red’s survival depended on twenty-five seeds in a freezer, how many other varieties, never requested and never grown out, are at this moment quietly losing the ability to germinate in their foil envelopes, with nobody to notice?

Rowe’s solution was to cross Marlow Red with a modern short-strawed wheat, and within three seasons she had a crop that stood up to summer storms and yielded almost as well as anything her neighbours grew. She sells it under the old name, which, she cheerfully admits, is something of a stretch, since rather less than half of its ancestry can be traced back to the seeds in that envelope.

It did not escape, but it very nearly fell over. Marlow Red grows to well over a metre and a half, roughly twice the height of a modern wheat, and its long, slender stems are prone to collapsing in wind and heavy rain, a weakness farmers call ‘lodging’. That July, a summer storm flattened half the strip a fortnight before harvest, and Rowe salvaged what she could by hand.

Rowe, to her credit, makes none of these claims, and is visibly irritated when customers make them on her behalf. Her argument is narrower, and in some ways more interesting. Old varieties, she points out, preserve genetic diversity that modern breeding has whittled away, including traits such as drought tolerance that may matter far more in a hotter century than they did in the last one.

Why, then, would anyone grow it? Rowe’s answer has shifted over the years, and she is candid about the fact that sentiment was the original motive. Her great-grandfather farmed the same land and, according to a ledger she found in the attic, grew Marlow Red until the First World War. She liked the idea of putting it back where it belonged.