Seed-Saving Wordy Wednesday

My Year of Meats. I snickered when I saw the title of Ruth L. Ozeki's debut novel. A colleague (can I call the assistant director of the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute that, now that I've graduated?) had mentioned Ozeki's work, which includes her second title, All Over Creation.

I read them both, one after the other, in a rush to find out if the infertile women get a baby in the end, if the public realizes what American meat/potato production is all about, if the minor character finds happiness, how the main character deals with her Japanese heritage.

And along the way, I ran across some unfamiliar words. The following are from All Over Creation, a novel that deals with Russet Burbank potato farming and seed-saving in Idaho.

Imagine you are a seed... And then imagine the triumphant moment when you crack the crumbly crust, poke your wan and wobbling plumule head through the surface and start to unfurl..." (3, 4)

A plumule is the rudimentary bud of an embryonic plant. The 3,000 acres of Lloyd Fuller's farm would look pretty vast to such a structure. Later, said Lloyd Fuller helps his wife, Momoko, pollinate her squash.

Momoko located one of the taped [male squash flowers] and plucked it, severing the stem several inches down the peduncle... Lloyd watched as the [untaped female] flower began to unfurl, a blooming in slow motion, but of course it wasn't slow at all. Just the opposite, because the wrinkled petals, once freed, spread far more eagerly and rapidly than was normal in nature and within minutes had billowed into a raggedy-edged corolla. Inside, revealed, were the plump quadrant lobes of the stigma, sticky and receptive. Lloyd was transfixed." (115-6)

A peduncle is a stem that supports flowers. Clear enough. And a corolla is, collectively, the petals of a flower. Corolla is Latin for "little crown" and was selected as the name for a line of Toyota's compact cars because of the tradition of using variations of "crown" for their primary models, according to Wikipedia.

This procedure was carried out before "Momoko's garden was nothing but spectral stumps and stalks and mounds of tumular snow, like the site of ancient burial" (81). Latin tumulus, meaning "mound." I see of lot of that in the Twin Cities right now.

red, white, and black
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