Colourful Romanesco

[Diane Whitehead]

I have always admired photos of Romanesco cauliflowers, and am now growing some from Italian seeds.  The photo on the packet shows it as pale green.

Johnny's catalogue has just arrived. They are selling two bright green Romanescos and one white one.  They also have brightly coloured regular cauliflowers:  Clementine which is a brighter orange than Cheddar, and a couple of purple ones.

My new project:  develop some brightly coloured Romanescos.

[Steph S]

I love this idea.
There are some beautiful cauliflower colors out there.

[Klaus Brugger]

Great idea!

I'm not sure if orange will work in an op cultivar, though.

I may be wrong, but I think all true orange cauliflower cultivars carry the Or mutation that was found in a field of 'Extra Early Snowball' in Canada in 1971 (published by Crisp et al. 1975). This trait apparently cannot be stabilized since the mutation will cause stunted growth with very small curds when homozygous. (Pictures of OrOr, Oror und oror can be found in the papers by Li et al. 2001 and Lu et al. 2006).

HM.Clause has been working on new Romanesco colours for their "Amoresco" brand. I think two orange Romanesco hybrid cultivars are on the market by now.



Papers

• Crisp, P., Walkey, D.G.A., Bellman, E., and Roberts, E. (1975): A mutation affecting curd colour in cauliflower (Brassica oleracea L. var. Botrytis DC). Euphytica, 24, 173–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00147182
• Li, L., Paolillo, D.J., Parthasarathy, M.V., DiMuzio, E.M., and Garvin, D.F. (2001): A novel gene mutation that confers abnormal patterns of β-carotene accumulation in cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis). The Plant Journal, 26, 59-67. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-313x.2001.01008.x
• Lu, S., Van Eck, J., Zhou, X., Lopez, A.B., O'Halloran, D.M., et al. (2006): The Cauliflower Or Gene Encodes a DnaJ Cysteine-Rich Domain-Containing Protein That Mediates High Levels of β-Carotene Accumulation. The Plant Cell, 18(12), 3594–3605. https://doi.org/10.1105/tpc.106.046417

[Diane Whitehead]

Yes, I think you're right about the difficulty with orange.

Fortunately there are quite a few o.p. purple sprouting broccoli, and also purple cauliflowers, including Purple Cape, one of the overwintering ones I regularly grow.