Art by Alice Tangerini: Zizania aquatica L.

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 3, July 2024.

The 21^st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “Advancing Plant Conservation Through Horticulture,” was held on May 17, 2024. Among the talks was one about conservation action for crop wild relatives. In 1997, Alice Tangerini illustrated this image of Zizania aquatica, southern wild-rice, an important constituent of aquatic plant communities of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast Plains. While not cultivated, Z. aquatica has been grown experimentally. This illustration appeared in Terrell, et al. (SIDA 17: 533-549; 1997). Tangerini made all of her sketches from Ed Terrel’s collections that were collected in Georgia in the early 1970s.  Terrel asked for the usual full size habit and inflorescence but also wanted the details of the spikelet and caryopsis. Tangerini immersed some caryopses of the Zizania in a Petri dish of water and set it on her hot plate to boil so the features would be more discernible. Forgetting this was a grain that people normally cook and eat, she returned later to find a dish of cooked rice ready to eat.