- 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.
Nibbles: Coral genebank, Seeds, PROTA
- A new frozen genebank — for corals.
- CAS-IP blogs about the launch and success of MASA, the Malawi Seed Alliance.
- Promising new plants for Africa from the PROTA database; a book. So many promises …
Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk, Fun fungus, ALVs, Breadfruit
- Best round up yet of what’s happening at Pavlovsk Experiment Station.
- Nature’s report on Pavlovsk is good too.
- Pavlovsk making waves in India too. S.Ananthanarayanan shares a write-up in The Statesman, Kolkata.
- More on that Chinese insect-eating fungus, or Chinese Love Flower. Yuck.
- A one-woman crusade for traditional African leafy vegetables. Right.
- Breadfruit trees in Jamaica. From the Trees that Feed Foundation, a new one on me.
Court decides against Pavlovsk but hope remains
We’ve just learned that the court has decided in favour of the federal housing authority to permit the destruction of the Pavlovsk Experiment Station’s field collection of fruit diversity. Some hope remains, however. The N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) says it will today lodge an appeal with the High Arbitration Court against the Supreme Arbitration Court’s decision. This gains campaigners another month to save Pavlovsk.
A spokesman for VIR also said that they had received further confirmation that the Court’s decision can be revoked by the President or Prime Minister.
We don’t know whether either Mr Medvedev or Mr Putin is actually listening, but if you haven’t already done so, it can’t hurt to let them know how you feel.
Vegetable varieties of “no intrinsic value”
In England, the government is asking for views on vegetable varieties of ‘no intrinsic value for crop production but developed for growing under particular conditions’. They mean heritage and heirloom varieties, which could be promoted through Commission Directive 2009/145/EC on conservation and amateur varieties of vegetables, but we advise caution. Can worthless be far behind?
Seriously, let them know what you think.