Glass Gem

Glass Gem's kernels are translucent, each one gleaming like a polished glass bead rather than a typical dusty corn kernel. Colors span pale white, gold, pink, red, purple, green, blue, and orange, arranged in vibrant patterns across each ear, with occasional ears appearing in solid blood red or blue-black. As a type of flint corn, every kernel carries a hard outer layer that protects the starchy endosperm inside.

Despite its ornamental fame, Glass Gem is fully edible: the kernels can be parched, ground into cornmeal or masa for dishes like polenta and grits, or popped as popcorn. As a flint corn, it is too hard to eat fresh off the cob the way sweet corn is, so its practical uses center on grinding and popping. Though it was selected primarily for its beauty and color, growers describe it as having good corn flavor. One quirk undercuts the rainbow fantasy: when popped, the colorful kernels turn the familiar white or light yellow of ordinary popcorn rather than staying vivid.

Glass Gem grows into tall stalks that typically produce three or four ears per plant, with ear length varying noticeably from one plant to the next. Harvest is timed to when the husks dry and turn brown. Because kernel color and pattern are shaped by selectable traits, growers can influence the mix of colors in later generations simply by choosing which kernels to save and replant.

Glass Gem originated in the 1980s when Oklahoma Cherokee farmer Carl Barnes crossbred three ancestral corns — Pawnee miniature popcorn, Osage Red Flour, and Osage Greyhorse — that had volunteered in his fields and were historically grown by the Cherokee and Pawnee peoples, producing a small-eared corn with jewel-toned, translucent kernels. Barnes grew it privately through the 1980s and into the 1990s until he met Greg Schoen at a native-plant gathering in 1994 and gave him a handful of seeds the following year. Between 2005 and 2007, Schoen worked with Jose Lucero of Santa Clara Pueblo to grow the corn alongside larger Spanish and Pueblo flour corns, and the resulting interbreeding gave it greater robustness and deeper color. In 2012 a photograph of the corn went viral online, building a wide following on social media, and Native Seeds/SEARCH now conserves and makes the variety publicly available.