Actually, I didn’t even know there was a Plant Conservation Day. BCGI put me on to it. And it does seem to be a celebration very much focused on botanic gardens. But why shouldn’t genebanks and heirloom gardeners and others interested in agrobiodiversity get in on the act too? We’ve got a couple of months to think up things to do…
Browsing Princeton’s image library
A short note in Global Voices sent me to the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts in search of anything vaguely botanical or agricultural. I found a treatise on botany with charming watercolours of many different plants, some cultivated. Perhaps someone out there who can read classical Arabic can tell us the gist.
Roaming a little further around the Princeton Digital Collections I also came across the Western Americana Photographs Collection, which has some really fascinating stuff. I had no idea that Indians stored acorns in specially constructed caches, for example. But it seems to have been a common practice in the Yosemite Valley.
IUCN assesses threat to mammals
Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation reminded us today — quoting an IUCN study from last year — that the African Wild Ass (Equus africanus) is critically endangered. Actually the Asiatic Wild Ass is also in trouble. The summary of the findings of the 2008 IUCN Red List of threatened mammals highlights the situation in SE Asia as particularly worrisome. People are clearly going through the data now and pulling out different themes. A few days ago there was an assessment of the state of rabbits, for example. I wonder if we can look forward to an overview of livestock wild relatives?
Farm business doing OK
Department of Silver Linings: No matter how bad things get, people still need to eat. The Economist reports on good times in the agriculture industry, even though “much of the global economy is falling apart and demand both for consumer goods ((Food, of course, is the canonical consumer good. Or is it?)) and the firms that make and finance them is collapsing”. You want scary?
China is consuming twice as much vegetable oil (instead of less healthy pork fat), 60% more poultry, 30% more beef and 25% more wheat, and these are merely the obvious foods. Scores of niches have expanded dramatically: people are drinking four times as much wine, for example.
And yet even with all this growth, people in China still, on average, consume only one-third as much milk and meat as people in wealthy countries such as Australia, America and Britain. The gap is even larger with India, which is also growing fast.
Buy now, while stocks last.
Do you know this fruit?
The folks over at The Human Flower Project are trying to identify this fruit, which apparently can be found in abundance in Oakland, California. They think they’ve pinned it down to Passiflora mollissima, but maybe you know better. I grew P. mollissima once, in an unheated greenhouse, and although it flowered well enough it didn’t set fruit. So although the flowers look familiar, the fruit remains a mystery. One of the reasons I wanted to grow it was to do this:
“The pulp is eaten out-of-hand or is strained for its juice, which is not consumed alone but employed in refreshing mixed cold beverages. In Bolivia, the juice, combined with aguardiente and sugar, is served as a pre-dinner cocktail. Colombians strain out the seeds and serve the pulp with milk and sugar, or use it in gelatin desserts. In Ecuador, the pulp is made into ice cream.â€
Those treats remain a fond hope. I had a quick look to see whether the juice or pulp might be available commercially in Europe, but couldn’t find anything. Is it?