Category: Featured

Dave Wood reminisces about the old days:

In the “good old days” Kew Gardens had an interest in economic botany — mainly to support crops that could be add value to colonial agriculture. Ramie figures in the fascinating contents of the second volume of the Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew … As an economic botanist I admit to never having heard of some of these species. And this “Bulletin” became “Kew Bulletin” — fine for taxonomists but of little use for economic crop production.

BTW, he also has something to say about the Ethiopian genebank.

From Denise Young of La Vie Verte:

I was in Tunis, and had the privilege of speaking with Dr Worede. He is a living inspiration, and someone whose face, spirituality and presence I will never forget.

And read her report from Tunis.

Greenfruit fan (we know who you are) weighs in on Unripe for plucking:

Unripe fruits as food are common in many cultures, including South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and the Caribbean. For their refreshing tartness or light sweetness, or unusual flavor.

Jeremy’s English Lesson: “Don’t eat those blackberries. They’re red. That means they’re green.”

Luigi asks the $64,000 question:

What I want to know is whether all these countries buying up leases have taken climate change into account. Will they end up holding pretty useless pieces of land?

Mappers and modellers, do your stuff.

Tai Haku drops a bombshell:

[The] Eden [Project] is almost exclusively crops – it relates to human/plant interdependence. There were cocoa, cork oak, bamboo, amaranth, coffees and any number of others when I was there. Relatively few “wild” plants.

Anyone else care to comment?