Nibbles: Botanical gardens, Glass flowers, Remarkable trees, Rhubarb history, Expensive pumpkin, Back to the future, Quinoa glut, Citrus greening biocontrol

All of BGCI’s ex situ surveys on one cool page. Have they re-modelled their website?
Harvard’s glass flowers are totally cool.
The world’s coolest trees.
Rhubarb is cooler than you think.
I’m not sure paying over a thousand pounds for a pumpkin seed is all that cool.
Conventional breeding is cooler than genetic engineering. Cool quote of the week: “I tell my students they should drop acid before they go to the field, and just look at the plants and let them tell you what they are doing.”
Is the coolness over for quinoa? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
Cool Pakistani bug may help with citrus greening in the US. But don’t stop looking for resistance, y’all.

The authors of book “Moving Crops and the Scales of History” have been awarded the Edelstein Prize 2024 for their work to “redefine historical inquiry based on the ‘cropscape’: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop.” Let’s see how many cropscapes we can come up with today.
Here’s one. The Ecuador cacao genebank gets some much-needed help.
Digging into Nigerian yams. And another.
Castle Hex has a programme on Lima beans on 7-8 September. Sounds like fun.
What if you can’t work out what the crops are, though? As in Mesopotamian recipe books, for example.
The community seed banks of Nepal have a new website. Good news for those Nepalese cropscapes.
A new project is testing RNA integrity number (RIN) as a metric of seed aging for a bunch of rare wild plants. One day maybe community seed banks will be using it.
China has inventoried its agricultural germplasm. Will it be applying RIN next?
The French are using bandes dessinées to teach about cryopreservation of animal genetic resources. Livestockscapes?
Some drylands are getting greener and some people think that’s a problem. Always something.