- Home gardens in Oaxaca, Mexico, conserve diversity and improve resilience. Good to know.
- Seed saving symposium to take place in Hawaii, April 17-18. Good to know.
- Apomixis for plant breeding a step closer in experimental systems. Good to know?
New Agriculturalist does (agro)biodiversity
The New Agriculturalist has a focus on biodiversity this month, including the agricultural kind. There’s a piece on the crop wild relatives distribution modeling work of our friend and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis. And a couple of things from my old stomping ground in the Pacific. All well worth a read.
The long wait is over
Rejoice. Today’s IUCN Species of the Day is a crop wild relative!
Nibbles: Neglected species, Diversity 4 Life, Rice, Databases
- What makes a species “underutilized”? Your chance to tell FAO and Bioversity International
- Global awareness of biodiversity campaign in the Philippines.
- Staying in the Philippines, drought imperils rice terraces.
- Database builders: read this and weep.
Plant seeks (en) light (enment)
On a quiet Saturday afternoon, one’s thoughts are liable to coalesce around the strangest things. Hence this post. I admired, briefly, Kew’s speeded up video of a lotus blooming, and thought no more of it.
Until I came across an illuminating post over at Gardenvisit.com that happened to be about … the lotus, specifically the sacred lotus of Buddhism. And, of course, what I didn’t know was the symbolic reason for the sacred status of the lotus:
The Sacred Lotus has importance in Buddhism because it grows from murky waters and struggles to raise its pure and beautiful flower into the sunlight, with the lesson is [sic] that humans should do likewise.
Which is as interesting, in its own way, as Kew’s koan for further contemplation: that the flower opens twice, to prevent self pollination.