Monthly Archives: April 2024

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Before potatoes and rice, there were pulses

Although I spent most of my career working on potatoes and rice, my first interest was pulse crops or grain legumes. In fact the first pulse that I studied was the lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) when I was an MSc student at the University of Birmingham from 1970-1971.

So why the interest in pulses?

It was surely the influence of one of my mentors, Dr Joe Smartt (right) at the University of Southampton where I was awarded my BSc in Environmental Botany and Geography in 1970. A geneticist who had studied groundnuts in Africa and at Southampton was working on Phaseolus beans, Joe taught a second year genetics course, and two in the third or final year, on plant breeding and plant speciation.

He published two seminal texts on pulses in 1976 and 1990.

It was Joe who ignited my interest in plant genetic resources, and encouraged me to apply for a place on the one year MSc course at Birmingham on Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources (CUPGR). The course had been launched by the head of the Department of Botany, potato expert, and genetic resources pioneer, Professor Jack Hawkes, with the first intake of students commencing their studies in September 1969. I landed in Birmingham a year later.

My three year undergraduate course at Southampton was a stroll in the park compared to the intensity of that one year MSc course. We had eight months of lectures and practical classes, followed by written examinations at the end of May. Each student also had to complete a piece of independent but supervised research, and present a dissertation for examination in September. In order to take full advantage of the summer months, planning and some initial research began much earlier. First of all for most of us, we had to decide on a topic that was feasible and doable in the allotted time, and assemble the necessary seed samples ready for planting at the most appropriate date.

Almost immediately I decided on three points. First, I wanted to run a project with a taxonomy/natural variation theme. Second, I wanted—if feasible—to work on a pulse species. And finally (which I decided quite quickly after arriving in Birmingham) I wanted to work with Dr Trevor Williams (right) who delivered a brilliant series of lectures on variation in natural populations, among others.

Trevor and I thumbed our way through the Leguminosae (now Fabaceae) section of Flora Europaea, until we came upon the entry for Lens, and the topic for my project leapt off the page: Lens culinaris Medik. Lentil. Origin unknown.

My project had two components:

  • An analysis of variation in the then five species of lentil (one cultivated, the others wild species; the taxonomy has changed subsequently) from herbarium specimens borrowed from several herbaria in Europe. I also spent a week in the Herbarium at Kew Gardens in London taking measurements from their complete set of lentil specimens.
  • A study of variation in Lens culinaris from living plants, with seeds obtained from Russia (the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg), from the (then) East German genebank in Gatersleben, and from the agricultural research institute in Madrid.

With the guidance of another member of the Botany department staff, Dr Herb Kordan, I made chromosome preparations and counts of all the Lens culinaris samples I’d obtained, confirming they were all diploid with 2n=2x=14 chromosomes. In the process, we developed a simple but effective technique for making chromosome squash preparations, and this led to my first ever publication in 1972. Just click on the title below (and others in this post) to read the full text.

In September 1971, I submitted my dissertation, Studies in the genus Lens Miller with special reference to Lens culinaris Medik. (which was examined by Professor Norman Simmonds who was the course External Examiner), and the degree was awarded.

I proposed that the wild progenitor of the cultivated lentil was Lens orientalis (Boiss.) Hand.-Mazz., a conclusion reached independently by Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary in a paper published the following year.

In 1971-1972, Carmen Kilner (née Sánchez) continued with the lentil studies at Birmingham, leading to a publication in SABRAO Journal in 1974. Our paper added further evidence to confirm the status of Lens orientalis.

When I began my lentil project, I had ideas to extend it to a PhD were the funding available. However, in February 1971 Jack Hawkes had just returned from a potato collecting mission to Bolivia, and told me about an exciting opportunity to spend a year in Peru at the newly-founded International Potato Center (CIP), from September that same year. My departure to Peru was delayed until January 1973, so I began a PhD on potatoes with Jack in the meantime. And with that move to potatoes, I assumed that any future work with pulses was more or less ruled out. However, from April 1981 I was appointed Lecturer in Plant Biology at Birmingham, and needed to develop a number of research areas. Would pulses figure in those plans?

While I wanted to continue projects on potatoes at Birmingham, I also decided to return partially to my first interest: pulses. And while I never had major grants in this area, I did supervise graduate students for MSc and PhD degrees who worked on a range of grain and forage legume/pulse species. Here I highlight the work of three students. There may have been more who worked on pulses, but after four decades I can’t remember those details.

Almost immediately after returning to Birmingham, I discovered (by looking through Flora Europaea once again) that the origin of the grasspea, Lathyrus sativus, was unknown. The grasspea is a distant relative of the ornamental sweetpea, Lathyrus odoratus, one of my favorite flowers since I was a small boy. My grandfather used to grow a multitude of sweetpeas in his cottage garden in Derbyshire. Anyway, I set about assembling a large collection of seed samples (or accessions) of grasspea and wild Lathyrus species from agricultural centers and botanic gardens worldwide.

The academic year September 1981-September 1982 was my first full year at Birmingham. Among the CUPGR intake was a Malaysian student, Abdul bin Ghani Yunus (right), who asked me to supervise his MSc research project. I persuaded him to tackle a study of variation in the grasspea and its wild relatives, much along the lines I had approached lentil a decade earlier.

We published this paper in 1984, and I guess it heralded what would become, a several decades later, an international collaborative effort to improve the grasspea and make it safer for human consumption.

Ghani returned to Malaysia, and I didn’t hear from him for several years. Then, in 1987, he contacted me to say he’d secured a Malaysian government grant to study for his PhD and would like to return to Birmingham. But to work on a tropical species, the name of which I cannot remember.

I persuaded him that would not really be feasible in Birmingham as we didn’t have the glasshouse space available, and it would be hit or miss whether we would be able to grow it successfully. I suggested it would be better to carry on his Lathyrus work from where he left off. And that’s what he did, successfully submitting his thesis in 1990 from which these papers were published.

Among the 1986 CUPGR intake was a student from Mexico, José Andrade-Aguilar (right) who was keen to attempt a pre-breeding study in Phaseolus beans, specifically trying to cross the tepary bean, Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray with the common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L.

José published two papers from his dissertation.

This next paper (for which I no longer have a copy) described how pollinations in Phaseolus species could be made more successful.

Then, in 1987, a student from Spain, Javier Francisco-Ortega (right, actually from Tenerife in the Canary Islands) joined the course, and he and I worked closely on his MSc and PhD projects until I left Birmingham to join IRRI in the Philippines in July 1991.

Javier was an extraordinary student: hard-working, focused, and very productive. After completing his PhD in 1992, he took two postdoctoral fellowships in the USA (at Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin) before joining the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in 1999, where he has been Professor in Plant Molecular Systematics since 2012.

For his 1988 MSc dissertation, Javier studied the variation in Lathyrus pratensis L., using multivariate analysis, and publishing this paper some years later.

Then, having successfully completed his MSc, and being awarded a second Spanish government scholarship, Javier began a PhD project to study the ecogeographical variation in an endemic forage legume from the Canary Islands, Chamaecytisus proliferus (L. fil.) Link., known locally as tagasaste or escobón, depending whether it is cultivated or a purely wild type.

With a special grant from the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR, now Bioversity International) in Rome, Javier returned to the Canary Islands in the summer of 1989 to survey populations and collect seeds from as many provenances as possible across all the islands, and I joined him there for several weeks.

Collecting escobón (Chamaecytisus proliferus) in Tenerife in 1989

After I left Birmingham, my colleague Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd took over supervision of Javier’s research, seeing it through to completion in 1992.

Together we published these papers from his research on tagasaste and escobón.

Once I was in the Philippines, I forgot completely about legume species, apart from contributing to any of the papers that were published after I’d left Birmingham.

One aspect that is particularly gratifying however is seeing the work Ghani Yunus and I did on Lathyrus still being cited in the literature as efforts are scaled up to improve grasspea lines.

 

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Belsay redux . . .

The relentless wet weather these past weeks has been a bit of a theme in my recent blog posts. Such that we haven’t been able to get out and about as much as we’d like. But when the forecast promises better days—even a few hours on some days—we grab those opportunities with enthusiasm. And so it was last Tuesday: sunny intervals although there was a cold wind blowing from the north.

Just after 09:30 we headed out to Belsay Hall, Castle, and Gardens, which is about 19 miles west from home on the route we took, on the A696 past Newcastle International airport and through Ponteland.

We first visited Belsay in 2009 while I was still working in the Philippines and we were back in this country on home leave. Since we moved to the northeast in 2020 we been back a handful of times, the last apparently in May 2022 (according to my photographic records) although I really did think we’d visited since then.

Belsay has been home to the Middleton family since the 13th century, living (until the early 19th century) in a castle and manor house some distance from the large hall that stands there today.

Sir Charles Monck (1779-1867)

To some eyes, Belsay Hall must appear rather austere, built between 1810 and 1817 for Sir Charles Monck, the 6th baronet (according to his own design – he was enthusiastic for the Greek classical style). It’s exactly square, 100 feet (30 m more or less) on all sides.

So why Monck? In order to inherit his maternal grandfather’s estates in Lincolnshire, Sir Charles he changed his surname from Middleton to Monck. His grandson, Arthur (the 7th baronet) inherited Belsay in 1867, and changed his name back to Middleton almost a decade later.

The Middleton baronetcy was created in 1662, but became extinct in 1999 on the death of the 10th baronet. However, the Middleton family still live on the Belsay estate, but not in the hall. That is an empty shell, and remains so under terms of its guardianship agreement from 1980. But that doesn’t mean that the interiors cannot be used for other purposes, as we saw last week. But more of that later on.

Belsay has been through a renaissance, receiving a huge investment to make the hall watertight by replacing its roof.

Two years ago Belsay was completely encased in scaffolding and English Heritage offered timed visits to see the repair work on the roof, which we just missed on our last visit.

A tubular slide was erected from the top of the building, which Steph and I could not resist trying out.

Now the scaffolding has been removed and you can once again appreciate Belsay in all its classical glory.

And English Heritage has not stopped there. Some of the estate buildings have been refurbished, such as the new café and toilets close to the castle. A new, and much larger car park has been opened close to the hall.

The gardens (which were always attractive) have received a lot of loving attention from staff gardeners and volunteers. We were told by one volunteer that during the Covid lockdown, there were only two gardeners working on the estate, and between them they planted more than 30,000 plants. On our visit the gardens were looking in excellent condition. It appeared that paths had been repaired, lots of new signs had been placed around explaining details about and the history of Belsay, and enhancing the visitor experience.

The Quarry Garden is a special place, and was waking up, with even some rhododendrons in full bloom. Having arrived just after 10 am, and after a welcome cup of americano in the café, we strolled through the gardens to the castle, and more or less had the whole garden to ourselves. So very peaceful.

The Belsay ‘wild man’.

On our walk around Belsay, there were many references to the ‘wild man‘, a medieval mythical figure —perhaps a Northumberland version of the ‘Green Man‘—adopted as a symbol of the Middleton family from the fifteenth century . . . and appear[ing] as a crest on the family’s coat of arms, in wall paintings, [and] as a carved stone statue. And in the ground floor hall of the castle, his story was told in an animation projected on the wall.

We also like to find the carved faces. Have you ever seen them?

Then it was back into the hall for the first time since 2021. As I mentioned earlier, all the rooms are bare, the wood panelling having been removed after World War II due to dry rot. And the leaky roof until recently didn’t help the situation one iota. Here’s an album of photos taken in 2021.

Since we became members of the National Trust and English Heritage in 2011 and 2015, respectively, I have become slightly obsessed with vintage wallpapers in their properties. And these have featured in several of my posts.

Belsay has some impressive wallpapers in several of the bedrooms on the first floor, although badly damaged in some rooms through damp and silverfish.

Wall paper at Belsay Hall (English Heritage)

Having no furniture to display, Belsay Hall has become an excellent venue for art exhibitions, such as the Lucky Spot by Stella McCartney made from thousands of Swarovski crystals suspended from the ceiling of the Great Hall of the Castle, which we viewed in July 2009.

And there was another exhibition, by Ingrid Pollard MBE, on display last week, which will continue until mid-July.

Ingrid Pollard’s exhibition covers the ground floor Pillar Hall, library, and dining room, and three first floor bedrooms, as well as several strategically placed polished steel mirrors in the Quarry Garden.

On the whole, I’m afraid I didn’t find her pieces too inspiring, apart from the mirrors in the Quarry Garden (Fissures in Reflection), and the sandstone rock suspended from the Pillar Hall balcony by ropes.

However, I do applaud English Heritage for taking every opportunity of exhibiting (and even commissioning, I believe) works of art to be displayed amongst Belsay’s impressive architecture.

 

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Once one of the greatest monasteries in England

At breakfast earlier last week, Steph and I were comparing this past winter to the other three we have experienced since moving to the northeast in October 2020. It’s not that it has been particularly cold. Far from it. But, has it been wet!

It feels as though it hasn’t stopped raining since the beginning of the year. The ground is sodden. And as for getting out and about that we enjoy so much, there have been few days. Apart, that is, from local walks when it hasn’t been raining cats and dogs.

So, with a promising weather forecast for last Friday we made plans for an excursion, heading south around 70 miles into North Yorkshire to visit Byland Abbey, built by a Cistercian community in the 12th century, below the escarpment of the North York Moors.

It’s 12th Cistercian neighbours—less ruined, and arguably more famous—Rievaulx Abbey and Fountains Abbey, stand just 4 miles north as the crow flies and 18 miles southwest, respectively from Byland Abbey.

We decided to take in a couple of other sites on our way south, stopping off at Mount Grace Priory for a welcome cup of coffee and a wander round the gardens, and then—just a few miles further on—the small 12/13th century church of St Mary the Virgin, beside the A19 trunk road that we have passed numerous times, but never taken the opportunity to visit.

St Mary’s was once the parish church of a medieval village, Leake, now disappeared. Nowadays it serves the communities of Borrowby and Knayton. The tower is the earliest remaining structure, and the church has been added to over the centuries (floor plan).

There is a very large graveyard, still in use today, clearly shown in this drone footage.

Then it was on to Byland, taking the cross country route from the A19. And along the way, I saw my first ever hare (and nearly killed, which you’ll see at 02’22 ” in the video below). This route takes you through the delightful village of Coxwold.

Byland Abbey is mightily impressive, even though it’s a shell compared to Rievaulx, for example. But I had the impression that it was much larger than Rievaulx, and it must have been magnificent in its heyday. Its foundation was far from straightforward, and it took the monks more than 40 years before settling on the site at Byland.

Its west entrance is simply a wall, with the remains of what must have once been an incredible rose window. We saw a note on the English Heritage hut (closed on our visit) that there was a template for the window on the inside of the West Wall, but we couldn’t find it.

And from the entrance there is a view straight down the length of the church towards the North and South Transepts and the High Altar. Just the north wall is still standing, mostly. And when I look at ruins like Byland, I am just in awe of the craftsmanship that it took to build a church like this, with such beautifully dressed stone. I wonder how big a workforce was needed for the construction over the 25+ years it is estimated it took to complete the abbey?

At various locations around the ruins, and especially around the site of the high altar, ceramic floor tiles uncovered during excavations are currently not on view, but protected by tarpaulins.

Like all the other religious houses across the nation, Byland was closed during the Suppression of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1538 and rapidly became a ruin. You can read an excellent history of the abbey on the English Heritage website.

You can view my photo album of Byland Abbey images (and from St Mary’s, Leake) here.

Leaving Byland Abbey, we headed up the escarpment on Wass Bank, stopped off to view the Kilburn White Horse again before heading down the precipitous 1:4 (25%) incline that is the infamous Sutton Bank.

The Kilburn White Horse can be seen for miles around, primarily from the southwest. It was supposedly constructed by a local schoolmaster, John Hodgson and his pupils in 1857. It covers an area of 6475 m² (or 1.6 acres). We had only seen it previously from a distance, or from the car park immediately below. This time we took the footpath at the top of the cliff, emerging near the horse’s ears. The walk from where we parked the car (alongside the glider field) took less than 10 minutes.

And although there wasn’t a good view of the horse per se from the path, the view south over the Vale of York was magnificent. We could see for at least 30 miles over a 200° panorama.

That’s the horse’s eye in the foreground.