Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Jeremy had one look at the map in the previous post and asked me whether it was possible that watermelon cultivation had collapsed in the Central Asia republics. Well, it has probably declined substantially, but clearly not entirely, as the photograph above suggests. You can read at length about the melons of Uzbekistan. And you can see below how things used to be, at least for other kinds of melons. Yes, old pictures of agrobiodiversity markets again.
I’m not sure why I like old photographs of markets so much, but one reason may be because at the back of my mind is the thought that maybe photos such as the one from Uzbekistan in the 1950s at left and similar ones from 1920s Egypt could be used to gauge genetic erosion. Too bad the metadata for the stock imagery at National Geographic (where the Egypt photographs came from) doesn’t include date. Anyway, speaking of agrobiodiversity photographs from Egypt, the wonderful Saudi Aramco World also has some in its latest issue.
While we’re on the subject of radicchio diversity, old Roman medicines and the like, we were pleased to be sent a link to Renaissance Herbals, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma. There are some lovely images to peruse and use, like this one, of wild chicory, Cichorium intybus.:
One could complain, of course, that the links between the illustrations and other sorts of information are non-existent. But hey, you can’t have everything.
