Hard on the heels of the 99 per cent Invisible podcast on Svalbard comes another once-over-lightly on NI Vavilov. A book by photographer Mario del Curto documents the genebank in St Petersburg and the legacy of its founder. A review of the book is mostly fine and dandy, although I do take issue with this image.
The caption reads “Sunflower plant at the Kuban research station (from Seeds of the Earth: The Vavilov Institute, © Mario Del Curto)”.
Can that possibly be correct?
It depends, they might call this a sunflower in Kuban. This is why we use “latin names”. Taxonomy and Carl Linnaeus useful tool. We wouldn’t call it a sunflower here.
What do the flowers look like? How does it smell? Edible, toxic, or neutral? It looks like it could belong in the Asteraceae, but how can we tell? Completely exasperated with all this sloppy misinformation. At least they could say genus or family.
Surely in Kuban they would call it подсолнух?
The `sunflower’ is sunn hemp: a not-yet-flowering Crotalaria juncea.