Wild Thing

At the Garden Writers' Symposium held in Tucson, Arizona, I met one of my horticultural heroes, Bill McDorman, founder of Seeds Trust. His high desert facility is dedicated to teaching gardeners to save seeds and to create native landscapes. Just outside his store is a clump of teosinte (Zea mays spp.), the wild progenitor of all modern day corn. The contemporary versions bear very little resemblance to its ancient ancestor. Teosinte is a tall, water-thrifty grass and rather than producing a cob, it bears a husk containing two rows of small, triangular-shaped seeds. Scientists believe that once people discovered that teosinte was edible, they began planting and irrigating them near their homes and these plants soon were bred into the thousands of varieties of corn now known to the modern world. Isn't it amazing that over centuries a wild grass with the help of millions of farmers transformed it into such a highly evolved and necessary food plant? Wild things, like teosinte, are nature's miracles.