Brassicas

their part in plant-breeding, medicine and warfare. The diversity of Brassicas we see today is the result of selective breeding at different times by different cultures, but they are all ultimately descended from one type of wild cabbage. The ease with which wild cabbage can be adapted by selective breeding was demonstrated in 1860, when researchers at Cirencester Agricultural College in the UK used simple selection experiments to produce broccoli and other cabbage-like species from wild cabbages found on the English coast. Variations in leaf form produced the tightly packed heads of today's cabbages and also other species with loose heads, while the development through selective breeding of various flower formations resulted in cauliflowers and broccolis. When the British naturalist Charles Darwin came to investigate crop origins in the mid-nineteenth century, he complained that botanists had generally neglected cultivated varieties. The leafy parts of plants tend to be poorly preserved in archaeological remains, but in the course of the past hundred years or so, developments in areas as diverse as physics, genetics and computing have all contributed data to the search for the origins of Brassicas.