Wellington in 1873

I walked to the city this morning through the Bolton Street memorial cemetary. One of the larger burial sites caught my attention and I stopped to read the headstone. It was the last resting place of an entire family of early settlers - children first, five children, lost within two weeks in the summer of 1867/1868.  A baby, an 8 year old a day later, then the 10 year old, 3 year old, and finally the 5 year old child. Devastating. I can't imagine what the parents must have felt, surviving their children two full decades.

What could it have been. An epidemic, influenza perhaps?  I wasn't able to pin-point a major Wellington pandemic which coincided with those dates. There was an influenza outbreak in 1918 - the spanish flu - but no mention of anything earlier in the national library. I did however come across a letter to the editor of the Wellington Independent in 1873 which described conditions in Wellington at the time, and typhoid fever was rife.  I have included some of the letter below - the sanitary conditions as described paint a vivid picture of the conditions which could easily have brought about the children's deaths (and with no penicillin or antibiotics to fall back on).

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=WI18730410.2.6

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3776, THURSDAY, 10th APRIL 1873, Page 2

It is almost twelve months since that the City Council went so far as to recognise that drainage was a necessary thing, yet the city remains at the present moment as undrained as ever. There has never been exemplified any realization of the necessity for establishing a thorough sanitary system in Wellington. There has been much talk about it, but nothing has been done, although every week deaths occur which are beyond doubt traceable to the absence of those precautions which science has proved to be effectual as against many of the fatal epidemics which periodically attack centres of population. 

The City Council may urge in extenuation that they could not provide a thorough system of drainage until the waterworks are completed, and this may be true. But there are many directions in which sanitary action could be taken, but which have been criminally neglected. It is sufficient for anyone to walk along any of the principal thoroughfares of the city to be able to understand the origin of the sickness which is now so prevalent. Every drain grating is simply a channel of miasma. After sundown, when evaporation is greatest, the foul and fetid fumes which are discharged from every opening to the drains is simply overpowering. Surely the least that the City Council could do is to provide traps so as to prevent the noxious effluvium from contaminating the outer air. 

It is well known that at this moment the worst form of typhoid fever is prevalent in the city. Several lives have been lost from this cause already, and there is a strong probability that many others will follow. Now, if there is one thing above another which modern science has been able to establish it is that zymotic diseases, such as typhus fever and typhoid disorders generally, are entirely traceable to the neglect of sanitary precautions. If the City Council cannot yet undertake a thorough system of drainage, they can, at least, mitigate the evils consequent upon the absence of such a system. They can and ought to take measures for ensuring the regular and constant clearance of the closets within the city. This, of itself, would be a very considerable step, for anyone who knows anything about the average state of the back premises of the city knows that it is simply disgraceful. In various parts of the town are to be seen filthy streams of pollution reeking in the sun and breeding disease around them. 

What is required and and what should be done is that a regular house-to-house inspection should be made ; the City Council should establish means for the 1 regular clearance of outhouses, and we are sure that the ratepayers would gladly pay the cost. If something of the kind, is not done speedily the metropolis of the colony will become a place to be avoided.

The tomato analyzer

I came across this useful piece of software for tomatoes, which could be very usefully employed in the poroporo experiment. All I need is a flatbed scanner and a license to kill (fruit that is), and probably also a license to use the analyzer. Looks wonderful for documenting fruit size and dimensions, and any changes in morphology as the years go by.
http://oardc.osu.edu/vanderknaap/tomato_analyzer.htm

So far they have not replied to my emails...

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 ;)

Just do it

I found three poroporo growing underneath the trampoline today! Seeded there by a bird no doubt. The light is good under there actually, and the cool conditions make an excellent plant nursery. Perhaps I should move the seed tray with 40 poroporo seeds underneath there with full expectation of good things (except the birds might dig it over).

I received my Wellington Botanical Society newsletter by email yesterday. This quarters' bulletin remembers Tony Druce and Eric Godley, each very well known botanists, who both passed away in the last few months. I feel connected to Eric's work through my study on kowhai in the 1990s. My thesis looked at the rbcL-atpB sequence from all New Zealand populations and offshore populations of Sophora microphylla, S. prostrata, S. tetraptera, and S. howinsula - collections that Eric put together at DSIR in Lincoln, now Landcare Manaaki Whenua.

I must write an article for the next newsletter, emploring local botanists to help me locate large poroporo fruit (or good specimens to collect from). I am not sure whether this will be of interest to a group who are largely concerned with the serious business of ensuring lesser-known plants don''t disappear into extinction. My experiment seems a little trivial in comparison, maybe even reckless. Who knows, maybe the birds won't be able to get their beaks around my poroporo of the future! (Yeah right!).