I confess, we had a bit of fun at the expense of the John Innes Centre yesterday. They tweeted:
Crossing wheat and peas – “how to” guides youtube.com/user/jicgermpl… Also new pea variety traced to Rohde,famous gardener us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=43f5e67f7ce…
— John Innes Centre (@JohnInnesCentre) February 4, 2013
Oh, how we laughed. And replied:
MT @johninnescentre: Crossing wheat and peasyoutube.com/user/jicgermpl… < Nice trick if you can pull it off without #GM
— Nikolay Vavilov (@NIVavilov) February 4, 2013
All immensely amusing, but that shouldn’t detract either from the JIC Germplasm YouTube channel — with it’s handy dandy videos explaining how to cross wheats and how to cross peas — or Seed Bank News, to which you can subscribe.
This paragraph caught my eye
One heritage variety of maple or carlin pea has been passed to the collection (JI 3590) that can be traced back to the famous garden historian and horticultural writer Eleanour Sinclair Ronde [sic] in the late 1930’s. This is a culinary long vined type that has been maintained by a family in Shropshire where it has been regularly grown at 1200ft and noted as having a good degree of frost tolerance compared to other common varieties.
As a long-time fan of carlin peas, and all the great stories associated with them, I’d love to know exactly how they traced JI 3590 to Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. But that’s just me.