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8/08/2008 Common Names of Plants

Pluots and Champagne Grapes

Pluots and champagne grapes are the August Fruits of the Month for lucky members of The Fruit Company's Exotica Harvest Club. The bubbly looking beauties Vitis vinifera are not actually the grapes of champagne production. But they are seedless, sweet, and are an exceptionally elegant decoration displayed in a champagne glass. In some circles Vitis vinifera are referred to as Zante currants, or currants, but not to be confused with red currants, genus Ribes. Also known as Black Corinth grapes, due to their cultivation at Corinth, champagne grapes have been around perhaps for 2000 years.

Conversely, the flavor-charged, vitamin A-rich pluot, a rather awkwardly named cultivar, is a 20th century generation of plum x apricot. Mostly grown in sunny California, pluots come in many varieties and are cousins of the aprium, derived from the plumcot.

9/11/2008 Plant Names

Hemerocallis 'Secured Borders'  

Where have all the flowers (and chlorophyll) gone? Consider the 2005 offering of Virginia plant breeders Walter and Sybil Przypek. Surely Reston has rubbed off on this breeding program which works drums of war propaganda right into the daylilies. It was discovered by Alfried Krupp, Europe's most powerful industrialist following his release by Col. Lucius Clay, director of Continental Can Co., from a Nuremberg sentence, that no matter which way you look at it, manufacture of missiles and rapid-fire killing implements will always be more profitable than what is called "peace time manufacturing" of garden tools and agricultural machinery.

Ironically, the leaf margins of Hemerocallis 'Secured Borders'  lack the pigments which give life to a plant, what many perceive as the peaceful color of green. Or perhaps the plant has been scared witless or is fainting at the prospect of another fifty years of war.