Continued from <-Heirloom Vegetables in Public Display Gardens, Part 3
Cayman Island life, circa 1900. Centerpiece of this museum is a restored farm house, surrounded by a landscape that includes traditional vegetables, fruits, herbs, ornamentals, and other plants.
A living history museum, Doon Heritage Crossroads re-creates rural Ontario in the year 1914. The grounds include a village and two farms with period gardens of heirloom vegetables and orchards of historic fruit varieties. Doon offers a number of special events of interest to heirloom vegetable gardeners: a Seedy Saturday seed swap, a heritage plant sale, and a workshop on saving seed.
Anybody who has tried to track down vegetables that are, say, a couple of hundred years old knows how hard it is to find really old varieties. Now multiply that by 10, and you start to get an appreciation for documenting food crops from the British Iron Age, circa 300 B.C. Still, that's what the historians at the Butser Ancient Farm have done. The crops here include Emmer wheat, Einkhorn, oats, rye, millet, peas, vetch, and beans. They even have a wheat that is 7,000 years old. Some of these crops, like peas and beans, are so different from their modern counterparts that visitors today may not even recognize them. Other features at the site, from the sheep breeds to the buildings, are also Iron Age. Wow!