- World Agroforestry Congress has a blog. Welcome to the blogosphere!
- Evil Fruit Lord does Korea. Korea still reeling.
- Sámi herders have lots of words for reindeer pastures. No, wait…
- UAE boffins fingerprinting their dates. Why, what have they done?
- Yet more on Cuban urban/organic agriculture from the BBC.
“I find that no Plants were as yet collected for His Majestys Garden at Kew”
Smithsonian Magazine has a long, wonderful piece this month about the breadfruit — and Captain Bligh — in Jamaica. It’s by Caroline Alexander, who wrote a book on the famous mutiny, The Bounty. People forget that after the Bounty debacle in 1789, Bligh eventually, doggedly went back to the Pacific and completed his original mission of taking breadfruit to the Caribbean. In 1793, the Providence finally delivered its Tahitian cargo to Jamaica. Its descendants are still there. There’s a companion piece on cooking with breadfruit which includes Diana Ragone’s (of the Breadfruit Institute) recipe for her tasty breadfruit nachos. You can become a fan of the Breadfruit Institute on Facebook, which is how I got to the Smithsonian piece.
The Glass Orchard
Driving from Ames to Des Moines last week, my friend Tom told me about Harvard’s Glass Flowers — more officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants. It’s a fascinating story. They…
…are a set of approximately 3,000 life-size models of plants made out of glass, with occasional bits of wire, paint, and glue. The collection is owed by Harvard University, where the models are on display in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, commissioned the models in 1886 from Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son team of glassmakers based in Hosterwitz, near Dresden. The Blaschkas produced the models over 50 years, Leopold until his death in 1895 and Rudolph until his retirement at age 79 in 1936.
They’re not just beautiful, they’re supposed to be useful too, aids to the study of tropical botany in particular.
There are many fruits and fibers in the collection, Rossi-Wilcox explained, ((Susan Rossi-Wilcox is a curatorial associate at the Botanical Museum.)) as well as other “useful” plants. “The Botanical Museum’s whole mission is ‘economic botany.’ Cotton, silk, the food we eat … We’re this odd little sister of taxonomy. The point of making this collection was to make people understand plants that were common in their lives.”
Some of the latest — and the best — of the Blaschka models are the series Rudolf made on the diseases of fruit trees. The “rotten fruit” series, Rossi-Wilcox affectionately called them. “They are the most spectacular models he made,” she said. “They’re animated, realistic. The cut sections don’t have the mealiness of real disease, but as fruit, he’s got it — all the little weirdnesses of the colors. Anyone who has fruit trees has seen these things.
I can’t find a full list of the “164 plant families, totaling 847 species and plant varieties” represented by the models. But I have found photographs of Musa paradisiaca, Prunus armeniaca and Gossypium herbaceum. And there is also an Emperor Alexander Apple “affected by apple scab disease”. So agrobiodiversity seems to be well represented.
Nibbles: Pluots, Village chickens, Axolotl, Artisanal fishing, Fruit and climate change, Stamps, Hornless cattle, Artemisin for malaria, Aquatic agroecosystems characterization, Speciation and ploidy
- What’s the difference between pluots and plumcots? By the guy who wrote the book.
- ACIAR publication on village chickens, and another. Thanks, DAD-Net.
- Modeling the axolotl, the edible Mexican salamander, before it’s too late.
- Artisanal fishing data. Via.
- USDA looking to expand its fruit collection to cope with climate change. NOt the only ones, I imagine.
- Danes stamp on allotments. No, wait. Allotments on Danish stamps.
- Aussies find genetic marker for hornless cattle that will jump on barbie by themselves.
- Breeding better Artemisia annua.
- The diversity of farmer-managed aquatic systems in SE Asia.
- 15% of angiosperm speciation events are accompanied by ploidy increase. Much more in domesticated species, I bet.
Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets
- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.