Category: Fruits and nuts

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The Breadfruit Story

That’s the title of just one of the sections of an exhibition of botanical watercolours, books and prints about the Caribbean called “Paradise in Print,” currently on at the New York Botanical Garden. The story it refers to, of course, is that of Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian and the Bounty.

For an update on the story of the breadfruit’s global journey, go to VOA News. You’ll find an interview with — and a cooking demonstration by — my friend and world breadfruit expert Diane Ragone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hawaii (both text and video).

The Breadfruit Institute maintains the world’s largest and most complete breadfruit germplasm collection. Diane has dedicated her life to the breadfruit, and in particular the idea that it can make a much greater contribution to the alleviation of hunger around the world. She and her research partners have been working on a tissue culture technique for the mass propagation and safe transfer of germplasm.

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It’s a wise grape that knows its own father

In the annals of plant breeding there are many stories that have achieved the status of Truth. Like the discovery of the original pink grapefruit, the parent tree marked forever with a P carved in its trunk, or the Red Delicious apple found in a ditch somewhere. Not quite so well known is the tale of Cardinal grapes. It is a delicious table grape that, so the story goes, was bred in 1939 at the Horticultural Field Station in Fresno, California, by E. Snyder and F. Harmon, by crossing Flame Tokay and Ribier.

Alas, it ain’t so.

Flame Tokay is normally considered a synonym — just another name — for Ahmer Bou Amer, an Algerian table grape. In the course of examining the DNA of a bunch of Mediterranean grape varieties, A. Akkak, P. Bocacci and R. Rotta ((Cardinal grape parentage: a case of a breeding mistake. Genome 50(3): 325-328 (2007) doi:10.1139/G06-145)) discovered that Flame Tokay could not possibly have been a parent of Cardinal, though they cannot show who is either. I don’t imagine E. Snyder or F. Harmon is still around to tell us what really happened. The researchers also prove that Flame Tokay is not merely a synonym of Ahmer Bou Amer but a mutant in at least one gene.

And in other grape news, two scientists in Switzerland are warning that the American Vitis rootstocks that saved the European wine industry from Phylloxera are threatening the survival of native wild European grapevines. ((Arrigo N, Arnold C (2007) Naturalised Vitis Rootstocks in Europe and Consequences to Native Wild Grapevine. PLoS ONE 2(6): e521. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000521)) Nils Arrigo and Claire Arnold say that:

The regrouping of naturalised rootstocks in interconnected populations tends to create active hybrid swarms of rootstocks. The rootstocks show characters of invasive plants. The spread of naturalised rootstocks in the environment, the acceleration of the decline of the European wild grapevine, and the propagation of genes of viticultural interest in natural populations are potential consequences that should be kept in mind when undertaking appropriate management measures.

In other words, watch out.

The American rootstocks have already displaced wild grapes from the flood plains of the Rhone, and there may be worse in store.