Collard enthusiasm blooms

A dozen specimens might qualify as an impressive collection of Antarctic minerals or Amazonian minnows, but it’s a measly mess of collard greens. So, in the early 1990s, when Agricultural Research Service plant geneticist Mark Farnham was put in charge of the brassica program at the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina, he went looking for more cultivars of what he calls “the most important leafy green in the Southeast.”

He found one in the pages of the local newspaper.