Grow your own in the conspiracy of vegetables

How many names of flowering vegetables and fruits do I know? I started ticking them off on my fingers after reading "Kyabetsu ni datte Hana ga Saku" (Even cabbages have flowers) by Hidehiro Inagaki.

Inagaki, a researcher at the Shizuoka Prefectural Research Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, describes the wonders of such flora in this book from Kobunsha Co.

According to Inagaki, there is reason we can't immediately bring to mind the flowers of common vegetables and fruits. Spinach and cabbage, for instance, are harvested before they flower, while their leaves are still tender. Eggplant and watermelon plants produce fruit after their flowers are gone, while the broccoli clusters that look like little green Buddha heads are actually buds.

But vegetables are plants, after all, and their flowers come with all sorts of self-propagation tricks.

Legumes have flowers with complex shapes that hide their nectar deep inside to lure bees. Horseflies and beetles may give up their search for nectar, but bees are smart. They find their way into the blossoms and, covered with pollen, flit from one blossom to another of the same species. Thus, the bees are dedicated pollinators.

Inagaki says that fruits turn red or yellow when they ripen and emit sweet aromas to attract birds and animals. Undigested seeds leave the bodies of birds and animals through droppings, where they take root in the ground.

It looks as though red peppers know exactly what they are doing: They make sure they are eaten only by birds, so that the seeds will be carried as far away as possible. I wonder where they learned that their spicy heat doesn't bother the birds.

Vegetables have been carried to all corners of the globe and modified to meet human needs. I feel a bit sorry for them, but Inagaki views the situation differently.

"In terms of self-propagation, those vegetables have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams as plants," Inagaki says. "Maybe they have evolved that way in order to win the favor of their best partners."

Concerns about food safety account for the rising popular interest in growing one's own vegetables or renting plots of farmland. For apartment dwellers, container gardening on the balcony is a viable option.

It may not be a bad idea at all to spend a Golden Week holiday hoping for a bumper crop this summer and joining in on what Inagaki describes as "the conspiracy of vegetables."

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 4(IHT/Asahi: May 12,2008)