Such stats have triggered alarm in the cloistered world of botanic gardens, institutions known mostly for their blissful detachment from the outside world. That includes relatives of the apple, plum, blueberry, pecan, walnut, potatoes, wheat, corn, and numerous beans, many of which contain characteristics that could prove critical to the survival of crops facing their own tumultuous shifts in growing conditions. In North America, a recent study in PNAS identified at least half of the “wild relative” populations in North America as threatened with extinction driven by climatic changes and other pressures. The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, concluded that conserving those varieties was critical “to cope with changing environmental conditions” in the future.īut three-quarters of the crop seed varieties on Earth in 1900 were extinct by 2015, and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts we are on the verge of losing as much as a third of the 400,000 remaining varieties. McAlvay led a research team last year that identified the Hindu Kush mountain range, stretching across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, as the source pool of diversity for the Brassica rapa crops, those relatives of Napa cabbage, turnips, and bok choy now growing in the New York garden. “Climate change drives home the importance of preserving wild landscapes, because they harbor plants important to our food security.” “With the industrialization and homogenization of the food system we have lost many of the characteristics that come from crop diversity,” he said. That is a mistake, says Alex McAlvay, who runs the NYBG’s crop wild relatives program. But most industrial agriculture treats them as more like unwanted weeds.

In many Indigenous communities, farmers encourage their growth along the borders of their farms to foster cross-fertilization between their crops and these hardy varieties. They haven’t been propped up with pesticides or weaned on fertilizers. From the grasslands of the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard, from the mountains of Central Asia and Mexico to the dry gulches of Arizona come the undomesticated family members of the plants we have tamed as food.īut they remain wild, out there growing on their own, evolved to ecosystems that may be far away from the fields where their domesticated cousins are cultivated to feed us. Many of us humans have cousins or aunts or uncles who may not conform with the rest of the family, who embarked on a different path, and yet are part of our family’s fabric-our “wild relatives.” The same thing exists in the world of plants.

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