Field Notes Corn Botany
~ by Jim Eagleman
To a gardener, or any plant lover, the profusion of flowers, produce, and greenery everywhere at this time of year is astounding. Frequent rains have helped add to the leafy explosion. Recalling past Augusts with no rain and the ground being a dried, cracked patchwork of dust, this year’ s lush herbal layer is a welcomed change. And we’ ll enter into fall with little or no fire danger. Not much of a gardener, but loving the production of one, I look to roadside produce stands to provide me with the luscious taste of homegrown tomatoes, peas and beans right off the vine, and sweet corn.
Is there anything better than fresh sweet corn?
When my wife and I saw a sign along the highway advertising garden veggies, with large letters SWEET CORN, we were drawn to pull over and buy at least a dozen ears. We had been looking for an indoor project, out of the summer’ s heat, and thought canning some corn would be a good idea.“ Let’ s buy several dozen,”
my wife said. Then she heard,“ We have a special today if you buy 10 dozen.” So, we loaded 10 bags of a dozen ears each into the back of the car.
Pulling down handfuls of husks off each ear, with the pile on a drop cloth in front of me, my mind drifted back to a long-ago botany class on the topic of corn. This usually happens to me: flashbacks of a lecture, terms to learn, slides on the screen. Note taking was not a skill of mine. I’ d sit there and say to myself, I’ ll never learn this stuff. Yet I must have. My botany classes help me appreciate the wonderful world around me.
Each ear I exposed was the fantastic result of fertilization, and not much different than other plants— but there’ s all that silk. Each strand of silk is a hollow pollen tube attached at the base to a minute kernel. The tassel at the top, usually dark brown as it dries, is at the top of the tube.
Botanists refer to the female part of a plant as the pistil, and it is made up of a stigma on top, a long
60 Our Brown County • Sept./ Oct. 2025