3 ms·

I can't believe the author left THESE out: https://www.google.com/search?q=geometric+brassicas&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=geometric+brassicas&tbm=

• technotony 12y ago
  Another plant he left out was Arabidopsis, which is the model organism most studied by plant biologists as it has the second shortest plant genome (they used to think it was the shortest). My company (http://www.glowingplant.com http://www.glowingplant.com) is engineering these to make them glow in the dark... so maybe we can make glow-in-the-dark broccoli next ;) It's not hundreds of years to make new cultivars now, dramatic changes can be achieved in months. Fun fact: you can make an arabidopsis look like a Brussels sprout with the modification to a single gene... it wouldn't taste as good though, that takes more genes!
  • jarin 12y ago
    That's probably because it's not even in the same genus as the others.
• riffraff 12y ago
  FWIW, this is the default broccoli in center italy (hence the name "romanesco"[0]). Took me decades to understand why american media used such weird broccoli (i.e. what the rest of the world call thus). [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli
• ajb 12y ago
  I've always wondered if those are the ones in the famous Diocletian quote "Would you could see the cabbages planted by my hand at Salona, you would then never think of urging such an attempt [to return from retirement as Emperor]".
• contingencies 12y ago
  In Chinese these are called 塔菜 (ta cai) or "tower vegetable".