THE WILD CABBAGE AND ITS CHILDREN.
Outside of the pretty coast villages that look out on the English Channel, beyond the thrifty fields and market gardens, lie stretches of land so rocky and uneven that it is unfit for cultivation. Tufts of weedy growth soften the bleakness of these desert places. Among the native plants that get a living from the scant soil is the wild cabbage, a lusty weed that attracted the atten tion of our savage forefathers, thousands of years ago, because its leaves were (and are to-day) succulent and pungent to the taste. So the leaves are in the big mustard family, to which all cab bages and their kindred plants belong.
All the way from the British Isles to Siberia the wild cabbage may be seen on untilled land, usually as a small plant on a spindling stem, its blue-green, fleshy leaves spreading in a flat rosette or closing at the top to form a loose ball. In soil of greater depth the stem lifts its head higher, year by year, and strengthens itself by woody fibres, the side shoots, short and of softer texture, bearing the leaves. Stems three feet high may be found in favorable locations on the Irish and English coasts but on the Channel Islands a wild cabbage might be mistaken for a tree of some sort. Darwin saw on the island of Jersey a cabbage stalk sixteen feet high! He said that twelve feet in height was often attained by these plants, whose woody stalks were used for rafters by island builders. Much smaller plants have stems three or four inches in diameter. Walking sticks are made of still smaller ones.
A spike of yellow flowers crowns the top of the wild cabbage plant, just like the flowers borne by garden cabbages to-day. Leave a solid head in the row after the crop is cut for market, and what happens? The head bursts open; the stem, hidden by overlapping leaves, keeps on growing. It forces its way out of prison, runs up a foot or two, and opens its yellow flowers, that fade and are followed by pods full of seeds. Again we see the relationship of this vegetable to the mustards.
The pods and seeds look and taste like those of all mustard plants.
We can imagine how the savage hunter, return ing to his cave at evening, nibbled a fleshy leaf of wild cabbage to quench his thirst. The pungent, watery juice was not unpleasant to the taste, and the inner leaves of the end rosette were tender and almost white. When the sons of those wild hunters went with their fathers they learned the berries and other wild fruits good to eat, and knew how to pick out the largest, tenderest heads of the wild cabbage plants. The next step may have come centuries later — a kind of gardening. I can fancy the women of the cave-dwellers gathering little cabbages for food, and two neighbors claiming a particularly good patch of the plants, and fight ing over it. The next step was to throw up some sort of wall around it, to help the selfish victor to defend his claim. Then we can believe that, while the men were off and the women on watch, the best plants were favored by a little digging of the hard earth around their roots, and maybe watered, if they suffered for a drink. Step by step, slow as the passing of the centuries, came the saving of seed of plants with the biggest, tender heads, and weeding and tending of the young cabbages with primitive tools. The best plants helped to be better, and their seed planted for the new crop : this is the way the wild cabbage became domesti cated, and improved, until men demanded the garden varieties, and the parent forms ceases to be used.
Every vegetable, every fruit, that now grows in gardens and orchards as a cultivated variety, sprang from a wild species. In many cases, like the cabbage, the parent plant is growing to-day in its original state, in some country. The large number of varieties is a sign of the great antiquity of the species.
Some wild cabbage plants showed a tendency to form little heads at the axils of their leaves. They were encouraged by the grower. Seeds of the best plants were sown. The new plants had better ax illary buds. Gradually the terminal shoot ceased to head. The result was the Brussels sprouts, one of the most delicate of all cabbage forms.