- Three days down, one to go in Rome.
- Indian hybrid chickens set to take over Uganda.
- Latest from CGIAR restructuring: the 6 research programmes agreed thus far. So how you like our latest toy?
- 60-tonne God of Rain unearthed; drought continues.
- Mozambique Raises Production of Staple Foods by 22% a Year. Amazing. How? And for how long?
More on those Azeri buffaloes
Thanks to Elli from the Save Foundation for this comment on our recent post on water buffalo in Azerbaijan.
They were crossed with Murrah in Soviet times, just like in the Ukraine and Bulgaria. I’m just preparing a report on Buffalo in SE Europe and we’ve been looking at the situation in Georgia too.
Good to know. Incidentally, I should have mentioned another source of livestock information on the previous post: Gridded Livestock of the World (GLW). If you squint, ((Or you click to enlarge, and then squint.)) you can just about make out that it does show some buffaloes in Azerbaijan and other countries in the southern Caucasus.
Nibbles: Breeding, Frankincense and myrrh, Roman pills, Chinese botanic garden, NPGS, Green red bush tea, Old banyan, Terroir, Botanic gardens and invaders, AnGR
- National Organic Coalition suggests USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture separate conventional and participatory breeding from anything involving DNA in considering projects for support.
- Second-guessing the Three Wise Men.
- Yet more on attempts to deconstruct ancient Roman medicines using DNA from tablets found in a shipwreck. Real Indiana Jones stuff.
- Botanic garden and genebank for drought-resistant plants to be established “in Asia’s largest wild fruit forest.” That would be in China. I really don’t know what to make of this. Really need to find out more. But why am I talking to myself?
- Brown (rice) is beautiful.
- Feedback from a genebank user. Kinda.
- Rooibos gets itself certified.
- The oldest cultivated tree on record.
- The taste of Massachusetts.
- “…strongly conservation-minded botanic gardens appear to be in the minority.” Easy, tiger. Will that new one in China (see above) feature in this minority?
- ILRI on an Aussie TV program on conserving local livestock breeds in Africa.
Capt Bligh’s biopiracy medal to be sold
Speaking of breadfruit, two of Capt Bligh’s medals are up for auction. One of them was awarded by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, later the Royal Society of Arts, for taking breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies in 1794.
As you’ll remember, that enterprise did not start well. But Bligh did not let a little thing like a mutiny stop him, and threw in Blighia to boot.
By February 1793 the breadfruit mission had been accomplished. Bligh also took specimens of the ackee fruit (Genus Blighia) of Jamaica to England and introduced it to the Royal Society and provided specimens for the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew. The Genus Blighia, which consists of some four specimens of evergreen tropical shrubs and trees, is named in William Bligh’s honour. The most commonly cultivated of these is the Blighia sapida.
But would it have killed them to put breadfruit leaves on the thing, really? Or Blighia leaves for that matter.
Katherine’s monkey’s peanut
In the original the monkey is being offered a peanut.
Really? Well, it’s an innocent enough statement in most circumstances. But a little problematic if the monkey is being held by Katherine of Aragon in a portrait from the 1530s. Were there really peanuts, a South American crop, so easily available at Henry VIII’s court in England only forty years after Columbus? ((Were there, indeed, monkeys? There seems to be a certain amount of uncertainty about the identity, and for that matter the very existence, of Katherine’s monkey. But that is for someone else to delve into.)) It’s not inconceivable, but really?
Ok, so how did we get here? It all started with a podcast from the BBC History Magazine which came out in April 2009. ((I’ve only recently started to follow them, and have been working my way back through the archives.)) In it, Brett Dolman, the Curator of Collections at Hampton Court makes the peanut comment in an interview with the magazine’s editor about an exhibition of portraits of Henry’s wives that was on at the time, and which was featured in the magazine. You can hear it at about 8:40 minutes into the podcast.
What Dolman says is that the portrait of Katherine of Aragon they had in the exhibition, which I take to be the one on the Hampton Court website, ((Having said that, compare that with the version on Flickr. I think the Hampton Court web people need to be a bit more careful about distortion of the images of the priceless works of art in their care.)) is a copy of an earlier painting. It is in the original that the monkey is being offered a peanut by the queen. In the copy, it is being offered a coin, but instead reaches for the crucifix at her neck. That’s apparently symbolic of Katherine’s belief in the sanctity of her marriage to Henry, and her refusal to accept money for a divorce.
Whatever. What we’re really interested is the original. The one with the peanut, remember? Well, I can’t be sure without too much more research than I can devote to this at the moment, but I think that original is probably “Katharine of Aragon with a monkey” (c1525) by Lucas Horenbout/Horenbolte, who was an official court painter. And here it is.
So is it a peanut? It’s difficult to tell, but I’m inclined to doubt it. The first European image of a peanut appears to come from a century later:
Another description of the Katherine portrait refers to “a scrap of food.” All in all, I’d go with that. And art historians of the world, I’m available for consultancies.