On Friday Luigi nibbled the New Yorker’s recent story What Comes After Heirloom Seeds?, singling out Luther Burbank rather than the more contentious issue of where plant breeding is headed. The New Yorker’s fact-checking is legendary, at least among a certain demographic, in which I number myself. So I want to draw attention to a single punctuation mark, which in my view is imbued with as much snidery as a punctuation mark can be.
Burbank’s prolificacy grew out of a creativity that could seem almost shameless. He was willing to cross just about anything that had leaves: a plum with an apricot (originally a plumcot, now a pluot); a tomato with a potato (a worthless novelty); a blackberry with an apple (no clue); a peach with an almond (!). Burbank’s theoretical validation came from Charles Darwin and his 1876 survey, “The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,” which Burbank seems to have mistaken for a how-to manual. He called himself an “evoluter” of plants.
Can you spot it? Yup, it’s that exclamation mark after the peach X almond cross. At first, I took the whole paragraph to be an expression of the author wilfully showing off his ignorance. After all, the examples seem like pretty obvious crosses to me. So I did a little cursory fact-checking of my own. Seems he’s a gardener. No, wait, he writes about gardening; not the same thing at all.
Why the surprise at peach X almond then? Blowed if I know. So I’ll just science it to death.
Section Amygdalus and section Persicae are closer [to] each other than to any other sections.
What that means is that the peach and the almond were probably the most closely related of the crosses Burbank made, and thus probably the easiest and the least worthy of notice.
The quote is from Phylogeny and Classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae), by Shuo Shi, Jinlu Li, Jiahui Sun, Jing Yu and Shiliang Zhou, published in the Journal of Integrative Biology (2013) 55: 1069–1079. ((Shi S, Li J, Sun J, Yu J, & Zhou S (2013). Phylogeny and classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae). Journal of integrative plant biology, 55 (11), 1069-1079 PMID: 23945216))
I’m surprised the New Yorker wasn’t aware of it.
Yes, I’d spotted that when you nibbled the link last week. The author doesn’t seem to be much of a cook either else he’d know they look and taste the same. (I’m a big fan of benzaldehyde in my food and drink.)
Thanks for the link: I’d wondered who my Burbank tomato was named after.
I, too, was “chuffed” by that “!”–glad to see I am in such great company, among the FOL (you know, Friends of Luigi)…
One nation separated by a common language. I wasn’t chuffed; I was peeved.
I think I need a definition for chuffed….I may be using that expression incorrectly!
It has diametrically opposite meanings — pleased and displeased — depending on who is using it and where they are from. For me, an effete southerner, it means pleased.
An exclusive and reticent club.