Maize

A small crop of strange plants which appeared in a garden at Dyke, near Bourne, almost 200 years ago caused great consternation in the farming world because of their size and the amount they produced.

These were the first examples of a variety known as Cobbett's Indian Corn which we know today as maize.

The seed had been brought to this country by William Cobbett (1763-1835), a farmer and journalist, who established a plant nursery at Kensington where he developed a strain of maize that he had found growing in a cottage garden in France. To help sell this variety, he published a book called A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn (1828) and soon it was being planted throughout the country.

The variety had originated in North America where it was known as corn, Indian being added because it was being grown mainly by native Americans although the word corn at that time was applied in England to any grain that required grinding such as wheat, barley, oats or rye.

Cobbett had first-hand knowledge of maize when he served with the army at New Brunswick, an English colony 500 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts, and his treatise traced the history of corn from biblical times when it was cultivated as the principal crop in many countries to its regular use in the New World. “When I came to ride through the corn fields of America”, he wrote, “ I understood how Jesus and his disciples might have gone through the corn in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem and when I came to eat the ears of corn and to find them so delightful, all the mystery was explained.”

He later became a political journalist in London advocating a reform of Parliament and the abolition of the rotten boroughs which he thought would help to end the poverty of farm labourers and he was also against the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain designed to protect cereal producers in this country against competition from less expensive foreign imports between 1815 and 1846 but in doing so kept corn prices at home at a very high level at a time when the working classes depended on bread as their staple diet.

Cobbett’s Indian Corn soon became very popular and newspaper accounts of its success established it as a regular and profitable crop. On Friday 7th August 1829, the Stamford Mercury reported that Mr John Beasley had started growing a number of specimen plants in his garden at Dyke, near Bourne, which was causing some amazement in the neighbourhood.

The report went on: “The small crop is much admired by those who have seen it. It consists of seven healthy plants. The seeds were planted promiscuously on about half a yard of land. The following dimensions were taken on the 26th July: from the ground to the top of the bloom, 4 feet 10 inches; from the ground to the top of the highest leaf, 7 feet 1 inch; the leaves average about 4 inches in breadth; and the stems measure, one with another, about 4½ inches in the thickest parts.”

Today, maize is widely cultivated throughout the world with over 159 million hectares (390 million acres) being planted annually and producing a greater weight than any other grain.

WRITTEN JUNE 2014