The Purple Galaxy Tomato splashed across the cover of this season's Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog: a closeup of a blackish-purple tomato speckled with tiny pink dots. Next to it, sits a sliced open fruit, revealing deep fuchsia seeds and flesh.
Traditional plant breeders to date have not been able to create a purple-fleshed tomato with cross pollination. Purple skin, yes? Purple flesh, not so much. But the next mystery is one that's harder to answer: How could seeds get from a closed lab in the United Kingdom to a hobby gardener in France? "For the same reason that regular tomatoes don't become weeds," he says,"They just don't have the characteristics that allow them to compete well in a crowded environment."
This isn't the first time a genetically engineered plant ended up with unwitting producers or consumers. In 1987, a German lab created an orange petunia by inserting a maize gene. It was never released to the public, but almost 30 years later, it wasFinland, again almost certainly from someone illicitly breeding them. The culprit plants were all over Europe and the United States, not growing in the wild, but in gardens, parks and train stations.
Baker Creek's Brazaitis says the whole experience of pulling the seed from their collection was very painful and worries about the long-term implications.
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