The story begins in the Mediterranean in the early 1980s when Professor Richard Mithen, currently at IFR, was on a field trip to collect rare plants as part of his PhD at the University of East Anglia. “We collected wild brassicas in southern Italy and Sicily, and that material was sent into various seed banks in Italy, Sweden and Spain,” says Mithen. “I was able to go on this expedition due to Professor Harold Woolhouse, the then Director of the John Innes Institute, who provided me with a small grant to cover some of my travel costs.”
If you want to read about this collecting trip, you can, thanks to the Collecting Missions Repository: look for CN375. Here’s the material the boys collected which ended up in Spain, according to an “advanced” Eurisco search, as mapped by Genesys:
Where does the story end, you ask? Well, with Beneforté ‘super broccoli’. And a fascinating story it is too. Read for yourself.
LATER: Prof. Mithen informs me the wild species involved was Brassica villosa.
Would anyone be able to estimate how much money would flow to the Fund of the International Treaty should this accession have been drawn from the Multilateral System?
Perhaps Seminis-Monsanto will make a voluntary donation to the Fund anyway! :-)