hopi blue maize

went out to campus on a chilly, rainy day just to check up on things and see what was up...the top three photos are a sort of simple study in wheat morphology...the ancestor intermediate wheat grass is in the top...in its third season it is going to seed again and will be augmenting its rhyzomatic spread with a new round of seeds...the second photo is of a winter wheat seed head that has ( so far ) been spared by the starlings, and the third is of a volunteer spring wheat seed head that the starlings haven't noticed yet either...there's a family resemblance all down the line that becomes even more noticeable once the seed heads ripen...the intermediate wheat grass seed heads do not shatter as readily as say something like spinach or a dandelion..it's easy to see why wheat is as labor intensive to thresh and winnow as it is...the trait was simple strengthened through the artificial selection of domestication...and speaking of ancestor-domesticate pairs...the fourth photo is of some newly emerged hopi blue maize ( there are three up in my back yard as well ) and the last photo is of the ancestor zea diploperennis...there is no sign of oaxacan green dent anywhere yet...more on that as it crops up.