History

CGN’s collection of lamb’s lettuce has a relatively short history. In 2008 it was agreed to include a selection of the most important Dutch varieties in the collection of the German national genebank in Gatersleben. In 2010 CGN’s new policy to specialize in vegetable crops resulted in the start of the development of several new crop collections.

These new collections also included lamb’s lettuce due to its relatively poor representation of genetic resources in existing collections and the importance of the crop to the Netherlands. As it was decided that CGN’s lamb’s lettuce collection should also contain the important national varieties, some degree of overlap with the German collection was unavoidable. Currently (April 2020), the collection consists of nearly 50 accessions, making it one of the largest lamb’s lettuce collections in the world.