Invading garlic

Allirai petiolata (garlic mustard)

Garlic mustard is native to Europe, western and central Asia, and nothern Africa. As a biennial, in the first year of growth, plants form clumps of round shaped, slightly wrinkled leaves, that when crushed smell like garlic (hence the name...). The next year plants flower in spring, producing white flowers that release seeds in mid-summer.

Garlic mustard leaves are a great addition to wild salads, providing a mild flavour of both garlic and mustard. Garlic mustard was once used medicinally as a disinfectant or diuretic, and was sometimes used to heal wounds.

In the late 19th century garlic mustard was introduced in North America as a culinary herb, and since has gone on to become a very problematic invasive species. The success of garlic mustard, like that of other invasive species, is due to its lack of native competitors. Garlic mustard produces a variety of compounds that reduces its palatability to herbivores. Interestingly, in its native habitats, some herbivores have co-evolved to feed happily on the plants. But these insects and fungi that feed on it in its native habitats are not present in North America, and this leads to more garlic mustard seeds, allowing it to out-compete native plants. Even white-tailed deer, the scourage of many Eastern woodlands, don't eat the garlic mustard, preferring neighboring plants, which frees even more space for the garlic mustard to spread.

The war in Syria and Global Food Security

Wild barley cultivars grown in ICARDA

Of all the implications of the civil war in Syria, probably very few of us have thought about the effect of the uprising on world agriculture and food security.

While this may strike you as strange, Syria houses one of the world's foremost research institutes - ICARDA, International Center for Agriculture in Dry Areas. Among other activities, ICARDA holds seeds from over 100,000 accessions of wild and cultivated crops in its gene bank, including 55,000 cereals. As part of Fertile Crescent, Syria contains  As reported in The Independent :

"As the birthplace of agriculture – the Euphrates is only 70 miles to the east – Aleppo is also the headquarters of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda), one of the finest institutions of its kind in the world. It increases food production in Asia and Africa in an area containing a billion people, 50 per cent of whom earn their living from agriculture. Donors include Britain, Canada, the US, Germany, Holland, the World Bank – you name it. And its 500 employees are still operating in Aleppo.

Alas, its principal research station at Tel Hadya, 20 miles from Aleppo, was raided by gunmen who stole vehicles – to use them as "technicals" mounted with machine guns – along with farm machinery and computers. Mercifully, Icarda's gene bank is safe and has been duplicated outside Syria. The Syrian government moved a military checkpoint closer to Icarda's property at Tel Hadya – the Syrian ministry of agriculture was always one of the more progressive offices in Damascus – but what use this will be in the coming days, we shall see."

The uprising in Syria also reflects on a similar research center in Israel - The Institute for Cereal Crop Improvement (ICCI) at Tel Aviv University. The ICCI holds seeds from about 20,000 accessions fo barley, wild wheat and wild wheat relatives. Both Syria and Israel are located within the Fertile Crescent, the center

Resistant and susceptible wheat cultivars
infected with yellow rust

 of origin of a number of wild ancestors of major crops such as wheat, barley, oats, legumes, olive, almond and more. These wild species, still growing in this region, serve as a rich gene pool for crop improvement with tolerance to drought and salinity and with resistance to different diseases. While direct contacts between ICARDA and the ICCI are for political reasons impossible, both institutes are part of the global effort to fight wheat rust disease funded by the Gates Foundation. All efforts must be made to ensure that the collections in both institutes are immune to toe regional conflicts that plague the Middle East.

(Thanks to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog for leading me to The Independent article)

Yuval Sapir: When plants move - seeds on my sock

Dr. Yuval Sapir is Director of the Tel Aviv University Botanical Gardens 


As taught in basic biology classes, plants differ from animals in several substantial ways, including mobility. While animals are mobile and can choose their environment, plants are stationary, rooted in one place.


However, while this might be true for an individual plant, on a different level, plant do indeed move, just at a different speed and with unexpected parts.  


While animals move their entire body, including all related organs, plants move only their embyos. Plants pack their embryos in a bag that is on the one hand resistant to environmental harshness, and on the other hand "opens" immediately to the right set of cues, which are a complex mixture of light, temperature and moisture. This package is of course the seed. This is the real moving part of the plant, moving sometime as far and as rapid as animals do, and even more.


Seed movement requires agents of transportation, and different types of seeds are adapted to different agents of transportation. These could be physical, such as wind, carrying light-weight seeds (sometimes equipped with wing-like appendices) to circle the globe like dust. Such are, for example, seeds of orchids. Animals, just to close the circle, are good transportation agents because they... well, move. Fury animals, like dogs and cats, are especially adept at transporting seeds, as so also are, surprisingly, (relatively) hairless humans.  In place of fur, our clothes become the furry vehicle that seeds hitch a ride on. See the picture of my leg, my sock covered with seeds of Daucus carota (the wild carrot) and other seeds. All are spiny and adapted to catch the fur on my (or on other mammal's) leg.