- Bioversity International and UNEP jointly pile on the pressure to preserve Pavlovsk …
- … as do plant professors from University of Wisonsin.
- Mexican maize farmers using CIMMYT genebank materials to adapt their varieties. Why not in Africa, then?
- High praise for a novel on opium.
- Mat Kinase takes Time to task over lacklustre organics article.
- King Goodwill Zwelithini calls for One Home One Garden campaign to support food-growing and nutrition.
- Feasts predate agriculture. Well, yeah.
- Female farmers … a bloke writes.
- Great pic on the joys of modern transhumance.
- Resurrecting the Maize King. And why not?
- More than anyone has a right to know about dogs in the ancient world.
Nibbles: Wild tomatoes, Brachiaria, Agroforestry, Syrian drought, Vegetable seeds, Durian
- How cool is it that a descendant of Charles Darwin is working on wild tomatoes on the Galapagos?
- More on the Brazilian “Economic Miracle.”
- Let my people plant trees on farmland!
- Trouble for Syrian agriculture.
- “The D. Landreth Seed Company has sold seeds to every president from George Washington to FDR.” And Obama?
- Views on the durian.
Those Tarahumaran beans, again
Thanks to Elise Blackwell’s gracious comment on the true identity of the bean she once grew and that offered her such a strong connection with what was happening at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station, I was able to go and look for more information about Tarahumara Carpintero. A pole bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), it was originally collected by Native Seeds/SEARCH, and here’s what the NSS catalogue says about it:
Striking black and white Jacob’s Cattle bean. Originally collected in central and southern Tarahumara country, Chihuahua. This pole bean is prolific with a little shade in Tucson.
More is almost impossible to find, given that Googling “bean carpintero” results largely in information about Mr Bean and people who work with wood. “Carpintero Tarahumara” is not much more helpful. It will take you to Native Seeds/SEARCH and a couple of other places that are interested in the bean itself. One Canadian site declares that it is Apparently Extinct, which kind of ignores the fact that it is still available in the NSS 2010 catalogue (and which is where I got the image).
As for Jacob’s Cattle, there are masses of varieties, and masses of information. Some people say that Jacob’s Cattle beans are originally from Germany. Others that “it was a gift from Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians to Joseph Clark, the first white child born in Lubec, Maine”. Most don’t bother to explain why the name fits, perhaps assuming that everyone is familiar with Genesis 30 (not the surrogate mother bit) and Jacob’s early experiments with epigenetics.
And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.
The stories that varieties tell can be every bit as fascinating as their other qualities; names are often the portal into the stories. That’s why they matter.
Nibbles: Eggplant, Cactus domestication, Berries, Conservation, Drought, Conference, Chaffey, Rice relative, Cornus, Adansonia, Pavlovsk, Genebanks, Dams
- How can you do Eggplant’s Rich History and not wonder why this generally huge, generally purple thing is called an eggplant?
- Domestication of the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe cactus; exceedingly complex. Oh and there’s a cool photo here.
- How berries protect the brain from age-related malfunction. Are you listening, Dmitry?
- Protect medicinal plants, says letter-writer.
- The world doesn’t understand drought tolerance, says another letter-writer.
- Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica conference.
- Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings from Annals of Botany. Must-read stuff.
- A wild relative contributes trait for early morning flowering to rice, allowing it to escape sterility induced by high temperatures.
- The Cornelian Cherry and the Baobab explained.
- Voice of America devotes Special English report to Pavlovsk. If that ain’t viral, what is?
- Genebanks on a roll in China. In Australia, not so much.
- Dam dataset online. Let the mashups proliferate.
A novelist on Pavlovsk and hunger
Elise Blackwell wrote a novel — Hunger — about the Siege of Leningrad and the people who starved at the Vavilov Research Institute rather than eat the seeds in their care. I haven’t read it, yet, although I have read interviews with the author. The Atlantic asked her to reflect on what is going on at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station. Very clever.
Genetic diversity is crucial to human survival and food is a central part of our history and heritage, but aesthetics matter too. In the place of an apple famed for its winter heartiness and a berry prized for its perfect sweetness will sit a commercial real estate development, the money earned off the bulldozed land going to those who successfully claimed in court that the Pavlovsk collection does not exist because it was never officially registered. Soon they will be accurate in more than legalistic terms: it won’t exist.
One thing puzzled me about her piece, though, and that was a reference to a bean she once grew, which she calls “the Tarahumara carpenteria,” italicized just like that, which suggests it could be a genus and species, but with a definite article, which suggests that if it is, Blackwell doesn’t know how to use a binomial. ((And why should she; I couldn’t write a novel.)) I know of the Tarahumara people, and I have grown one of their heirloom sunflowers. But I could find no trace of this bean either in the interwebs or in my copy of the 2010 Seed Savers Yearbook. Blackwell doesn’t indicate what kind of bean it might have been: bush or pole; common, runner, lima or tepary. I checked them all. It isn’t there. I checked the USDA. It isn’t there. I checked Native Seeds/SEARCH. It isn’t there. Please, someone, tell me I am wrong.
This is not to cast doubt on anything Elise Blackwell wrote. Really. It is to suggest two things. First, if anyone is still growing a bean called anything like Tarahumara carpenteria, would they please, please ensure that someone else has it too, and not just as memory-laden specimens for weighting down pie crusts. And secondly, as someone long ago once told me; “write it down, because the weakest ink lasts longer than the strongest memory.” ((Or did I read it somewhere? A self-referential footnote.))