You may have noticed a certain slackness in our blogging last week. That’s because we were both travelling for work, Jeremy holed up at an undisclosed location with lots of copy and a red pen, myself in Warsaw, trying to drum up support for genebanks. It was my first time in Poland, and much too short a visit, but I learned a lot. Like that Poland is a huge apple exporter. It also, and perhaps not coincidentally, has a lot of apple diversity, and Poles are very proud of it. Even a small corner grocery shop in Warsaw will have half a dozen and more distinct varieties on display.
That, I was told, is at least partly due to the tireless efforts of the famous apple breeder Prof. Szczepan Pieniążek, founder and long-time head of the Research Institute of Pomology in Skierniewice. The apple genebank there has maybe a thousand accessions still. Prof. Pieniążek has obviously left quite a legacy, despite being, if I understand the Google Translate rendition of his Polish Wikipedia entry, a proponent of quasi-Lamarckian theories, after the fashion of the equally famous Russian breeder Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin. I guess, in breeding, practice is much more important than theory.