if you have a look at the bottom photo you'll see that some critter has been in the teosinte bed in my back yard again and has busted one of my zea diploperennis plants..upsetting to a degree but also beside the point...what i noticed while i was assaying the damage was that, like the northern tepehuan teosinte and the zea mays, the zea diploperennis is sprouting tiers of support roots...even if it is a bit later in the season...they are more compact and lower to the ground and may not have felt the need for additional support until recently...i went out to ( second, third, and fourth photos )campus later this morning and the zea diploperennis there is developing them as well...so there is a morphological connection between the three plants and more evidence of their being reasonably closely related genetically...the zea mays/zea diploperennis realtionship is buttressed by more than just tghe remarkable similarity of the leaves and the leaf nodes )...the top photo is of a zea mays flower ( albeit about done in) and a northern tepehuan teosinte plant flowering just behind it...unlike the support roots, the blooms don't bear much resemblance to one another apart from being a typically subdued grass flower...genetic similarities and mutation are what make evolution plausible.
in a garden, but not zea, related story, i got my level 2 usda account verified this morning and applied for a permit to import seeds for wild potatoes from peru this afternoon...intermediate wheatgrass and wheat, teosinte and maize this season...Solanum acaule and Solanum tuberosum next and we can move the morphological comparisons into cultural anthropology ( i'll tell you how after i write the paper ) still geeked about this project, and moving it in different directions...sustainability first...then we'll work on permaculture...inexhaustible subject ( for me anyway )
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