Category: History

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Hiroshima trees live on

Today is the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It is amazing to think that some trees survived the explosion — the so-called hibaku trees. Hibaku means “something that has experienced a nuclear bomb.”

Dr. Riki Horiguchi, Hiroshima’s resident caregiver to all Hibaku trees in the city, maintains and nurtures the specimens that are still standing 64 years later. So many of the trees in The Hiroshima Botanical Garden and in the surrounding vicinity of the blast were irrevocably altered in appearance, and yet new life continued to spring forth from them. With Horiguchi’s dedication to the seed collecting and cultivation of authentic Hibaku trees, he has managed to safeguard the existence of second and third generation Hibaku trees.

Artist Hiroshi Sunairi, a professor at NYU’s Department of Art and Art Professions, and a native of the Hiroshima region, “shares Horiguchi’s hand-collected Hibaku tree seeds with anyone in the world who is sincerely interested in honoring their collective vision and intent.” He has second and third generation round leaf holly, persimmon, chinaberry, Firmiana simplex, Japanese hackberry and jujube trees.

Whether you live in New York or New Delhi, Sunari will happily provide you with a Hibaku seed (depending on what variety will thrive in your planting zone) as long as you cover the expense of shipping via FedEx.

You can join his Facebook group. Via.

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Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI

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    Old maps used to track down hops in Sweden

    ResearchBlogging.orgI’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking about the theory and practice of germplasm collecting in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across an example similar to the one described in a recent paper in Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. ((Strese, E., Karsvall, O., & Tollin, C. (2009). Inventory methods for finding historically cultivated hop (Humulus lupulus L.) in Sweden. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. DOI: 10.1007/s10722-009-9464-9.))

    In it, Swedish researchers describe how they took advantage of a couple of interesting quirks in the history of Sweden to devise what I think is a pretty novel strategy for sampling agrobiodiversity. They were interested in collecting germplasm of hops (Humulus lupulus) for a new genebank that’s under development. Now, the thing is that, although this crop is no longer grown in Sweden now, for 400 years from 1442 doing so was compulsory, in order to guarantee sufficient domestic production for beer-making. Very sensible, too.

    Initially, all peasants were required to grow at least 40 hop poles. By 1483, the quantity was increased to 200 hop poles. The law was not formally repealed until 1860. As a result of this law, the plant has left several financial, fiscal and legal imprints on Swedish history.

    The second historical curiosity about Sweden is that it boasts a unique set of some 12,000 large-scale maps dating back to the mid-17th century. Because of the hops law, hop gardens are actually marked on these maps in some detail (click to enlarge).

    hops

    So the collectors used what they call a “history to plant” method to identify likely areas for collecting, using not only maps such as the one reproduced above, but also…

    …medieval charters from the fifteenth century files of land belonging to the abbey of Vadstena, documents from the expeditions of Carl von Linné and his pupils from the eighteenth century and also documents from the breeding program in Svalöf from the beginning of the twentieth century.

    And a pretty successful strategy it was too.

    We found no hop plants at locations which were not indicated in the maps as hop gardens. Today living plants were possible to find in more then 33% of the total inventoried sites, indicated as hop gardens on large-scale maps.

    As I say, I can’t think of another example of the use of historical maps to locate specific crops for sampling. No doubt the specific circumstances that made this possible in Sweden are not all that common around the world. Anyway, if you know of similar work, let me know. Always interested in keeping up to date with the latest in germplasm collecting.

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    Nibbles: Dogs squared, Afghanistan’s poppies, Rice at IRRI, Book on sapodilla chicle in Mexico, Opuntia, Trees

    • DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
    • Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
    • “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
    • “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
    • “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
    • Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
    • TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.
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    Iris in Japan and Tuscany

    We went to the Hirishoge exhibition here in Rome some time ago, and very impressive it was too, but I don’t remember seeing this particular woodcut.

    iris

    I’ve in fact only just come across it, on Flickr, where there is this fascinating commentary:

    In the village of Horikiri in suburban Edo, gardeners grew a year-round variety of flowers and were particularly famous for the iris shown here, “hanashobu,” well suited to this swampy land. In this print Hiroshige has shown three, almost-life-size, detailed specimens of the nineteenth-century hanashobu hybrids and in the distance, sightseers from Edo are admiring the blossoms. In the 1870’s the cultivation of hanashobu had begun to spread rapidly in Europe and America and the developed into a booming export market for the gardeners of Horikiri. The Horikiri plantations began to wane in the 1920’s and eventually turned over to wartime food production. After the war, one of them was revived and is now a public park, particularly popular in May when the flowers are in bloom.

    Continue reading “Iris in Japan and Tuscany”