A diary of back garden botany, urban ecology, rural rambles and field trips to the middle of nowhere...
Tuesday, 5 February 2019
These are Crimson Flowered Broad Beans. I bought a packet of them a couple of days ago at Seedy Sunday, the annual seed fair held in Brighton. I grew this variety in the garden several years ago (as seen in the second photo) and will try some on the allotment this year.
They date back to at least the 1700s and would have disappeared from cultivation were it not for a lady called Rhoda Cutbush a couple of centuries later. She grew them all her life in Kent as did her father before her. In 1978 she donated her last three or four beans- perhaps the last in existence- to the Heritage Seed Library who cultivated them and revived the Crimson Flowered Broad Bean.
Seedy Sunday is part of the movement to nurture and protect open source seeds, one of the most important political issues of our time. A lecture I attended made a telling point: through a series of mergers and acquisitions three multinational companies now supply around sixty percent of the world's seeds and sixty percent of the world's agro-chemicals.
In contrast to open source they are using patent law to copyright seed production. This is already happening with cultivars developed using traditional cross breeding techniques and is even more applicable to GM methods. If you can copyright the food chain you can control it; the implications for food sovereignty and biodiversity are worrying. So thank you Rhoda Cutbush for the Crimson Flowered Broad Bean.