The Noble Tomato

[thesummerqueen]

Solanum lycopersicum

This slice of tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, eventually destined to be part of my BLT, shows the essential characteristics of the fruit, which is botanically a berry - defined as a fleshy fruit derived from a single ovary. In the tomato's case it's a multi-seeded berry, with each of the numerous individual seeds attached to the central placenta via its own vascular supply. You can see in this section that the fleshy fruit wall - the pericarp - is divided into distinct layers: the outer exocarp (with more concentrated red pigment); the mesocarp; and the endocarp which is partly juicy and fills the fruit chambers (loculi) that surround the seed.

It has all evolved to attract a hungry animal and those seeds in the fruit loculus are perfectly capable of passing through the mammalian gut unharmed. That's why feral tomato plants are often a prominent feature of sewage farms. Seeds of the distinctive yellow fruits of the Galapagos tomato, Solanum cheesmaniae, endemic to those islands, are eaten by Galapagos giant tortoises that disperse the seeds (slowly and not very far away) in their droppings.

Tomatoes are said to have been introduced into Europe by the Spanish conquistadors, who found that they were already widely cultivated by Mesoamerican civilisations when they arrived in the New World. For centuries tomatoes were viewed by Europeans with suspicion and considered to be poisonous. Somehow the idea that they were aphrodisiacs arose, first in Italy then in France and finally in England and they became known in all three languages as 'love apples'. The term persisted for a long time and in my copy of Everyman His Own Gardener:The Complete Gardener, written by Thomas Mawe and John Abercrombie and published in 1855 - and which you can download here - they are still referred to both as 'love apples' and tomatoes, although by that time their tasty flavour and nutritious qualities were recognised.

And the kind of breeding I like to hear about:

You can see both here, on a flower pedicel, with the very short glistening glandular hairs covering it's surface.

Here, at higher magnification, you can see just how densely packed they are. Some tomato genotypes have glandular trichomes that contain particularly high concentrations of insect-repellent volatiles, and there's now a lot of interest in transferring this characteristics to cultivated tomatoes, to reduce the need for growers to use chemical pesticides to tackle aphids, red spider and white fly, which can blight the life of an avid tomato grower.

Feel free to post growing suggestions, favorite recipes, or stupid tomato lore, if anyone cares. Cucumbers are my favorite to grow because you can essentially just water them and leave them be, but nothing much beats wandering around a garden munching a tomato like an apple.