We – photographer Kate Geraghty and myself – had been flying blind and we still were. Nearing the end of almost a month reporting on a mindless Ukrainian separatist war and the heart-numbing missile strike that destroyed the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on July 17, 2014, we had decided that if families and friends of the Australian victims could not get to the crash site, then we were obliged to bring them a keepsake.

First we wondered about a small quantity of soil, which might be carried in a locket. But we settled on seeds – they would be lighter, more compact and, with careful gardening, might be propagated from year to year. It would help too, we thought, that sunflowers are such happy chaps.

We were an Australian news crew in a war zone. However, because we were not there in any official capacity, it seemed we alone had the freedom of movement to harvest the seeds. But as time ran out and my imagination took over, we became overwhelmed by the idea.

“This is something for government,” I told Geraghty, and then I contacted Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s office to outline my grand plan, which was for Canberra to buy a local farmer’s crop of sunflower seed and distribute the seeds to families and friends of Australian victims and perhaps even to governments representing the other 260 victims. But there was no call back from Canberra – and the appearance of giant harvesters in nearby fields told us we needed to act fast.

We made a dawn arrival at Rassypnoe, which we had dubbed ‘‘the cockpit village’’ because it was where the cockpit section of MH17 had crashed to earth. We stood among head-high plants with a big empty suitcase – and in the absence of any cutting tool, we soon found that the only way to part the bread-plate sized flowers from the stringy stems was to wring their necks, as it were. We then drove north for five hours, to clear the conflict zone, and flew to Kiev.

In the capital, my hotel room quickly took on the look and smell of a barnyard, as I shucked the seeds from the flower heads. By 2 o'clock the next morning my hands were blistered and blackened, but the volume of the bulky suitcase had shrunk to a more manageable bundle of tightly rolled hotel laundry bags, weighing just 1.5 kilograms. Geraghty headed to Australia that morning; I came home to the US.

When Hinder started talking in her emails about the ‘‘viability’’ of the seeds I was again suspicious and decided to do my own ‘‘viability’’ test. I sprouted a few seeds in damp cotton wool in a saucer on my kitchen windowsill – and tweeted a picture of the first tender shoots. “Proof of life,” I told Geraghty.

Hinder then broke the news to me that on being examined by her expert colleagues, the seeds were found to be of poor quality. And when she speculated on a fallback, of setting some of the seeds in resin blocks to give to the families and friends, I thought: “Uh, uh – we didn’t do all this to give the families and friends a paperweight.”

The offer of seeds from the fields over which MH17 had disintegrated elicited a heartfelt response from across Australia and around the world. First there were dozens and then a steady trickle till as recently as June 2015, from the families and/or friends of all the Australian victims and from victim families in the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere.
The Dutch father of the only American on the flight wanted seeds. The family of the sole New Zealander asked for some, as did the Melbourne-based brother of Captain Eugene Choo, one of the pilots on the MH17 service that was bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam.

Even the emails I received in which the authors had tried to withhold information told me something – like the extended family for whom the MH17 grief was infinitely more complex, because of another deep turmoil that was only alluded to; and from a woman, the hint of an affair or perhaps unrequited love in a brief email in which she did not reveal the name of the man for whom she mourned – and who she wished to remember with sunflowers in her garden.

Their collective grief pummelled me like an ocean dumper.
Meryn and Jon O’Brien, in Old Toongabbie, NSW, were mourning their son: “Our son Jack O’Brien, 25 years old, was killed on board flight MH17…”

Janine Kaye, in Karrinyup, Western Australia, was guiding her pre-teen daughter through the cruel and abrupt end to a friendship: “My daughter Lucy is 11 and Evie Maslin [one of three siblings from WA who died in the crash with their grandfather] was one of her closest school friends. Her heartbreak over Evie’s loss is an ongoing struggle…”

Dan Talbot, in Busselton, WA, wanted to console his bereft wife:
“My wife, Catherine, lost a friend in the MH17 disaster and I would like to surprise her…”

Jonn Ayley, in Tawa, NZ, was blunt on his family’s loss: “Our son Robert was blown to pieces by the missile…”

Vanessa Rizk, in Sunbury, Victoria, was resigned to becoming an orphan: “It’s just my brother and myself now. We have some amazing extended family – but nothing is going to compare to our beloved parents.”

Sam Nord-White, in Mount Eliza, Victoria, looked out from the gaping hole left in her family by the death of her sister Frankie and her brother-in-law Liam Davison, but she couldn’t touch the sides:
“We’re still in disbelief that they’re not coming home from their holiday.”

Still in Mount Eliza, Kerry Saville was also mourning the Davison couple who for her, were dear friends: “I was struck by the strange beauty of the fields of sunflowers. I clung to the thought that amidst the horror we watched and felt was a strange beauty that our friends would have somehow appreciated. The sunflower has become a comforting symbol amongst family and friends and I would love to have some seeds if you have enough.”

Clearly, in the face of such outpourings a paperweight would not cut it. But I worried for naught – Nicola Hinder would come through for them all.

Hinder, 43, is assistant secretary for pathway compliance at the Department of Agriculture, which puts her in charge of what we used to call quarantine – these days it’s called biosecurity. That obscure title of hers is about ensuring adherence to Australia’s strict regulations on the import of all plants and animals, under which sunflower seeds are deemed a high risk. Hinder was already alive to the Ukraine story by dint of her membership of an interdepartmental committee managing the MH17 crisis in Canberra.

As one of her colleagues put it, she could have thrown the book at us. Instead, as others articulated regulatory protocols on the importation of dodgy seeds, Hinder went in to bat for us.

“Initially, there was quite a debate – but it was Nicola who prosecuted the argument that we should do the right and decent thing,” the colleague said.

Without that backing and the science that Hinder and her colleagues brought to the venture, even if we did get the seeds into the country, they likely would have been a disappointment to any gardener.

Hinder reported back regularly. Initially it seemed the only good news was from the saucer on my kitchen windowsill. Her reports from expert colleagues at the Knoxfield Post Entry Quarantine Facility in Melbourne’s south-east were dispiriting – externally, the seeds were very dry, of poor quality; internally, they were poorly developed and shrivelled.

But because of what was happening at my kitchen window, she added: “I have asked the guys to sow a bunch of the seeds and we will know in about seven days, if there are any signs of growth.”
Hinder spared me some of the grim detail. But recently her plant pathologist colleague Mark Whattam revealed to me just how precariously our venture had been poised.

“First, we tried to germinate some of the seeds on cotton wool – but no success,” he said. Next he opted for a hot water treatment. “We kept them in water at 52C for 20 minutes, to sterilise the outside and some of the inside of the seeds,” he said. “Of 1000 to 2000 seeds treated, just 40 to 50 germinated.”

The best of the seedlings were then potted separately in 20 pots, which were divided into two lots and placed in separate glasshouses – “we split them just in case something went wrong in one of the glasshouses,” Whattam explained.

On January 28, there was a mood swing in Hinder’s reporting:

Doing the maths, she reckoned that on a typical yield of about 1000 seeds per sunflower head, the 20 plants would give us about 20,000 seeds – “a larger number than you brought back”.

It was time to let go of my doubts about Hinder’s good intentions, and in a January 29 email, I told her: ‘‘I need to thank you and your colleagues for such a decent, human and sporting response.’’

We all had to bide our time for about 20 weeks as the plants matured, during which Hinder sent a running series of photographic reports – the first of which showed two tiny green leaves bravely pushing through a cover of mulch, with a 10¢ coin beside them for us to gauge how big – or perhaps how small – they were.

Meanwhile, Whattam and his colleagues did regular examinations to ensure our seeds would not introduce any exotic diseases to Australia.

By the start of March, the plants were about 60 centimetres tall. “Hopefully we’ll see the development of some seed heads within the next few weeks,” Hinder said.

On March 25 she reported the plants had reached 1 to 1.5 metres in height – and seed heads were developing. But as the flower heads formed, Whattam turned his mind to a particular problem – how to cross-pollinate them in the absence of bees. His solution was to get one of the taller members of his staff to go from one plant to the next with a paintbrush, brushing the pollen from plant to plant.

And there’s more – Hinder’s idea of setting some of the seeds in resin proved to be the preferred choice of dozens who had asked for seeds.

As we packed the last of about 200 packets of seeds and resin blocks late in June, to be dispatched across Australia, I began receiving emails and letters from MH17 families in Europe, to whom we had been able to send seeds months earlier, because the continental biosecurity regimes are far less restrictive than in Australia.

An email from Hans de Borst, in the Dutch seaside town of Monster, was an explosion of colour – a burst of delicate yellow by his garden fence, which he described as ‘‘new life’’, a reference to his 17-year-old daughter Elsemiek who died in the crash, along with her mother, her stepfather and half-brother.

Days later, a Dutch TV crew brought me a video clip of 55-year-old Thomas Schansman, whose son Quinn died as he travelled to Indonesia to meet his family for a holiday. Showing the cameraman a thriving sunflower plant, Schansman says: “We treat it … well, we treat it like a baby, our baby Quinn.”

Geraghty and I had set a target of getting the seeds to families and friends before the July 17 anniversary of the MH17 tragedy. In the first week of July, we dispatched parcels and resin blocks to families around the country.