History

History... celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of the king's bastards, but cannot tell us of the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly - J. Henri Fabre.

 Jack and the Wheat Stooks - a bedtime story 

I love this quote, though it is probably a little unfair. After all, the history of modern hexaploid bread wheat is extraordinarily complicated. But it does speak to the fact that agriculture and horticulture are not especially well regarded professions, these days as in old, possibly because of the dirty knees and gumboots. Also most definitely the story of wheat would take some explaining in an oral account or bedtime story. Two separate hybridization events, leading to polyploid evolution and trigenomic accumulation (= 6n). {Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) x goat grass (T. longissima) = 4n (Durum and Emmer wheat, T. turgidum) x another goat grass (T. taucschii) = 6n (Bread wheat, Triticum aestivum)}. No wonder the wheat genome is five times bigger than ours!!

Feeding the world is all very important, but the story of plant breeding is about ornamental plants too, even  stripey petunias! I have been reading the book "Hybrid" by Noel Kingsbury, and he talks about a "domestication syndrome" - with traits favourable to domestication being genetically linked, so that an increased dependence on humans for reproduction is linked to compact size and a tendency towards self-pollination. The examples he gives are two from the Solanaceae plant family - tomatoes and capsicum pepper. Can I invoke this syndrome through selecting poroporo fruit?

I don't know much about the Solanum aviculare plant yet - save the Maori did eat the berries (calling them kai tamariki, meaning childrens food) and they are also found in Australia (where they are called kangaroo apple). So imagine my surprise this week to find the seedling I transplanted four months ago has flower buds on it already, being only itself about 20cm high. This is good, this is very good. If the plants would flower only in their second year, my experiment would take 60 years to complete, and I would have to come up with a fascinating bedtime story to pass to the younger generation in order to complete it ;)