Ancient Web: Diversity Built a Handlinked Museum of Potato Varieties

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most supermarket shoppers know a few kinds of potato. Nigel Deacon's Diversity website seems determined to make readers learn the names of several hundred more.

Visit the Diversity potato index.

The large central page links individual varieties such as Arran Victory, Highland Burgundy Red, Pink Fir Apple, Salad Blue, and Shetland Black, alongside lessons on genetics, blight, breeding, container growing, flower colors, and cooking qualities. It behaves like a botanical field guide built by someone who also wants to know how each specimen turns out in the kitchen.

The site's own preserved 2003 version explains its origins. Deacon says the whole Diversity website initially had about a dozen pages and eventually approached a thousand. The older potato page includes a small growing experiment: two varieties in no-dig beds and twenty in pots, with tubers buried beneath successive layers of compost.

Potatoes have family trees, not just recipes

The present index is especially useful because its subjects lead in so many directions. A visitor can look up the difference between waxy and floury potatoes, read about chitting seed potatoes, compare photos of tubers and flowers, or follow the history of breeders such as John Clarke and Archibald Findlay.

Deacon even gathers historic horticultural advice from 1847, 1854, 1890, and 1912. Those historical texts are presented as sources to explore, not necessarily as today's best growing practice. Pages on potato diseases and breeding link older techniques with later developments such as blight-resistant varieties.

The 2003 page explains the motive for photographing uncommon varieties: genetic diversity is worth preserving. The author was fascinated by unusual flowers and flesh colors, and by the possibility that a potato with unimpressive flavor could still carry useful traits for breeders. This gives the collection a real research angle beyond colorful pictures.

The homepage itself can be exhausting. Its link index spills across many rows, with varieties and historical subtopics pressed together like a paper reference book that has run out of margins. For this subject, that density is a useful invitation to wander.

The site also includes unrelated radio plays, apples, wines, artwork, and music. Deacon's potato obsession is one wing of a much larger personal library.

Explore the modern-but-handbuilt potato catalog and the original 2003 page.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.