Field of Science

A very merry Berry-Go-Round #47 and more

Oops. Forgot about BGR and failed to submit any blogs. My bad. But nonetheless the Roaming Naturalist rounded up some interesting December blogs for your amusement and edification.
Here's an interesting round up of recent bio-agricultural blogs from the
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. In particular you might like the article on guerilla grafting, a new approach to urban farming. Next garden ninjas will be crawling over our fences at night to snag some zucchini.
And then some people get a kick out of the most mundane things, and they must be happy people. So zip over to
Get Your Botany On and see the first flower of 2012. Having low expectations helps, but bragging rights are bragging rights. Actually a number of these winter rosette or winter annual plants are in flower sort of, or not, because they have what are called cleistogamous flowers; they never open beyond the bud stage and are self-pollinated in the bud. This may be the case for this little mustard.
The Phactor is having trouble, just old habits really, in remembering the current scientific name of the tomato, so it was good of the
Digital Botanic Garden to remind me. Let's fact it, after calling the tomato Lycopersicon esculenta (the juicy wolf peach) for 40 or so years, it's hard to remember that it is now Solanum lycopersicum, the nightshade wolf peach. This happened because tomato was found to be part of the nightshade lineage, and the specific epithet esculenta (um) was already in use, so they epitheticised the old generic name. And it's a simply great image of a pre-BLT tomato.
Enjoy.

5 comments:

Pat said...

As Solanum esculentum was taken, did the name not simply revert to the earliest validly published and untaken name for tomato as part of the Solanum genus, that of Lamarck in 1794? Agreeing with the opinion of Linnaeus from 1753, as well.

According to Lewis and Short "esculentum" means "fit for eating, good to eat, edible". Juicy would be suc(c)ulentum. Just like their English equivalents esculent and succulent.

The Phytophactor said...

What Pat says!

Payt said...

Apparently the Solanum lycopersicum L. of Linnaeus is now the accepted name not that of Lamarck, according to the reply I got from The Plant List over their tomato confusion. Good old Linnaeus.

Pat said...

I hit enter and backspace together, that was me again, not Payt.

The Phytophactor said...

Linnaeus does not get enough credit for being a great scientist.