The botanical world just got a bit less colorful - Hugh Iltis RIP

Hugh Iltis was one of our most colorful botanical colleagues. He was a professor at the U. Wisconsin; died about a month ago, but TPP just learned of it.  Here's the obit and some pictures; he was 91.  There are more stories about Hugh Iltis circulating in the field of botany than just about any other single person. TPP watched him challenge a colleague about one of his favorite topics, the origin of maize, by throwing an ear of field corn at him from across an auditorium and having the kernels shatter from the impact on with the wall behind.  Indeed, there was very little that interested Hugh that he was not passionate about especially the relationship between people and plants, and their conservation.  
His 1976 New Year's card is an drawing of the flowering head of perennial teosinte, a wild grass from southern Mexico that Hugh discovered. This shows five female flowers, in two rows, and the long fuzzy stigmas of the 3 flowers in one row form the looping design.  
Yes, perennial maize, and it will cross with cultivated maize, a genetic treasure trove for breeders.  For a long time botanists were puzzled about how this kind of structure flowering head, could give rise to the huge, multi-rowed "ear" of modern maize (corn here in the USA). Hugh's major contribution to this  story was to realize that the "ear" of modern maize had the structure, the organization, of the tassel of teosinte, and was a feminized inflorescence; a whole lecture could follow.  
Hugh on a rampage was a force of nature. At a big public lecture at our university, Hugh went on a 30 min verbal rampage about the evil corporations, primarily EXXON, lacking any ecological ethics, and then got back on track, lecturing for another 50 mins, and young women in the row in front of us, assigned to attend and who had no interest in botany, corn, or conservation, had tears running down their cheeks by the end.  Indeed that was Hugh. Love him or hate him, he was amazing and will be missed.  

Biodiversity in the maize and soybean desert

TPP has long joked about living in the maize and soybean desert of the upper midwest. Sadly this does a grave injustice to deserts because even the harshest desert has more biodiversity than our agricultural fields. 200 years ago this was tall grass prairie which has a surprising and substantial biodiversity and this same grassland community built some of the richest soil in the world. Here in Lincolnland the tall grass prairie is all but gone, less than 1% remains, and it was largely displaced by maize, and later soybeans. In a photoessay of the world's biodiversity, David Liittschwager would document all the biodiversity in a one-cubic foot volume found in a day. In a Costa Rican rain forest, 150 different species were found in his one-cubic-foot placed in the canopy of a strangler fig tree. And all over the world he found surprising biodiversity, and it's mostly surprising because humans pay very little attention to the little organisms. But in a maize field here in north central Lincolnland he got quite a different surprise. Sadly, he found nothing, nothing but maize. In our zeal, in our passion, in our desire for maize, our agricultural methods have come as close as possible to creating a complete monoculture. It's no wonder that more wildlife lives in our cities and towns than outside the city limits because out there it's a biological wasteland, except for crops.  This represents nature bent entirely to human will, and again because little attention is paid to this, it's been estimated based on measurements here and there, that half of this marvelous prairie soil is gone, and so is the community that made it. So how smart are humans anyways? Do you need a crystal ball to see what the future may bring?

Whiskey (whisky) primer

An article asks, "What's the difference between bourbon and whiskey?"  This is sort of like asking what's the difference between ice cream and vanilla ice cream.  Beer is a beverage made from malted cereal grain, and a distilled beer is a whiskey; spelled with an E in USA, probably the result of all those Irish immigrants.  So  bourbon is a type of whiskey made in the USA.  Bourbon is technically a maize (corn is any common grain - ask for "corn" in Scotland and see what you get) whiskey, but the USA let's them get away with as little as 51% maize.  Tennessee makes the same type of whiskey but it's not called bourbon even though it is.  It's a wonder Kentucky and Tennessee were on the same side of the Civil War.  Speaking of that Rebel Yell bourbon wasn't "exported" (north of the Mason-Dixon line) back in TPP's graduate student days.  Canadian whiskey is also a sort of bourbon, but it can't be called that and be imported to the USA, so Canadian whiskey it is. Scotch is a different sort of whisky (spelled that way where it's made), and some of the barrel aged whisky is blended, cut or diluted with neutral grain spirits (don't bother) or straight malt whisky (read your labels folks).  All bourbon is straight malt whisky.  Yea!  The best bourbon cocktail in the humble opinion of this author is the Old Fashioned, and the two best ones TPP has ever been served were at The Girl and The Goat (Chicago) and Sobu (New Orleans).  Hint: use orange bitters!  Hope that was edifying.

Turkey tales

Common names are the bane of biologists because they can be applied, misapplied, multiplied, and codified, all without any rhyme or reason.  Such it is with the Turkey.  What you may ask does the Republic of Turkey have to do with this native N. American bird?  Short answer: nothing.  When good old Columbus stumbled upon the Americas, he thought he had reached the western most portions of Asia.  Thus the natives of the "east Indies" must be Indians, and neither people so referred to has been very happy about this ever since.  When Europeans first observed this N. American bird they mistakenly thought it to be similar to the guinea fowl, which was also called the Turkey fowl as it had been imported to Europe via the great trading centers of Turkey and the far-flung Ottoman Empire.  The name turkey stuck probably because that is what it was known as to European immigrants who followed.  The same fate was in store for maize (the native N. America name for this native grain), so please, it's not corn, which only means common grain of the region (as for corn in Scotland and see what you get).  In Gerarde's (1597) great herbal (get a pdf of the whole damned book for free!) maize was called "turkie wheate" (p. 97, to save you the trouble of the index) and it did not receive a glowing recommendation as the grain was "hard and evill digestion, a more convenient foode for swine than for men".  Naming new things after the country of origin, or their supposed country of origin is very common.  Next where is the crane in craneberry?