posted: March 29, 2005

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In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo left Navidad, New Spain (Acapulco, Mexico) to explore the Pacific coastline from Baja California to Alta California. Cabrillo noted that many of the Natives of the coastal areas wore animal skins and lived in huts built of willow frames covered with tules and mud. The tule huts were practical—water-resistant, warm, and easily constructed. Tules (Scirpus californicus (C.A. Meyer) Steudel) once grew in the vast marshes of central and coastal California. [Click here to read more...]

posted: February 15, 2005

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The southern live oak (Quercus virginiana Miller) is a graceful, yet massive tree and symbolic of the southern U.S. Live oaks produce long sinuous branches. Grown in the open, the lowest branches sweep the ground. At a distance the tree forms a dome of deep green leafiness. Live oaks growing in close proximity send their twisting branches any direction that reaches light. A cluster of live oaks take the shape of a single tree. In a forest, the trees stand taller with gentler arcs to the branches. [Click here to read more...]

posted: January 11, 2005

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In Mexico, the huautli was cultivated on the chinampas, the elevated gardens the Aztecs created from marshland and lakes. The brilliantly colorful plumes of flowers are 'grain amaranths', Amaranthus cruentus and A. hypochondriacus, domesticated in Mexico and Guatemala. Cultivation of these amaranths is ancient. Seeds have been found as grave goods in caves near Tehuacan Puebla in Mexico dated to 5500 years ago. [Click here to read more...]

posted: October 18, 2004

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The six hundred or so species of yams (Dioscorea Linnaeus) are warm-temperate to tropical plants. The genus is scattered about the globe—Africa, Asia, southern North America, and South America. The tubers of some of the species are edible and high in starch. Others are toxic containing saponins and sapogenins, yet have cultivars that are perfectly edible lacking the toxins. And some of the toxic species are edible if prepared properly, but these are usually considered 'famine foods'. [Click here to read more...]

posted: September 7, 2004

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It is thought that lupins, lupines or termis beans (Lupinus albus Linnaeus) were cultivated as long as 3000 years ago by the Egyptians. Certainly, the seeds were common in the middens (trash heaps) of Myos Hormos, a Roman settlement in Egypt dating to the first and second century. Pliny the Elder wrote a lengthy treatise on lupins calling them "the next most extensively used plant...." In the New World, the tarwi or variable lupin (Lupinus mutabilis Sweet) was cultivated throughout the Andes 1500 years ago, domestication long predating the Incas. [Click here to read more...]

posted: June 22, 2004

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Gum benjamin or gum benzoin is a wound-response resin produced by the Sumatran snowbell (Styrax benzoin Dryander). The resin or balsam forms only after the bark of the tree is wounded. Harvesting gum benzoin [ben' zo in] begins with damaging one side of the tree with an axe. The milky resin oozes from the gashes forming 'tears' and collects between the bark and the wood. When the resin has hardened, the wounded bark is stripped away and scraped and the tears collected. [Click here to read more...]

posted: April 27, 2004

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When Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1498, he mentioned fields of corn (Zea mays Linnaeus) eighteen miles in length. The town of Hochelega (modern day Montreal) was surrounded with large fields of corn when Jacques Cartier and his men visited it in 1535. One of Hernando De Soto's men commented on the abundance of corn cultivated around the villages of the Apalachee (modern day Tallahassee) in 1539. [Click here to read more...]

posted: March 23, 2004

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Oats are annual grasses. Usually planted in the spring, they grow, flower, and produce seeds before dying in the autumn. Oat or oats refers to both the plants and their seeds. Oats belong to the genus Avena and, depending upon the authority, there are anywhere from "13 species and subspecies" (Technical Bulletin 1100, National Agricultural Library, USDA, 1955) to "fewer than fifty species" (Hortus Third, L.H. Bailey Hortorium, 1976). Oats are problematic; their history is obscure and the number of varieties makes determining genetic relationships difficult. [Click here to read more...]

posted: March 9, 2004

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Broomcorn (Sorghum bicolor variety technicum (Körnicke) Stapf ex Holland) is a utility plant, not eaten but useful to humanity. Broomcorn probably derived from a sweet sorghum (variety saccharatum grown for syrups and molasses) somewhere within the northeastern quadrant of Africa. Sometime during the Middle Ages, people along the Mediterranean began cultivating the plant for its unique, long branched panicle or seedhead, commonly called a brush. [Click here to read more...]

posted: March 2, 2004

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The carnaubeira or carnauba palm (Copernicia prunifera (Miller) H.E. Moore) is native to northeastern Brazil. The palm grows to about 14 meters (45 feet) in height; the leaves bases are retained on the trunk giving it a spiraled appearance. The fronds (leaves) have a petiole about one meter in length; the blade is almost round with its edge divided into 40 to 60 segments. [Click here to read more...]

posted: February 24, 2004

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The domestication of maize or corn (Zea mays Linnaeus) began sometime around 7,000 years ago. The history of corn is unknown, but the plant spread by trade throughout the American continents. The New World peoples depended upon this grain as a staple. But a diet built around corn can cause a severe medical problem, pellagra. [Click here to read more...]

posted: February 17, 2004

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In 1493, the Spanish introduced sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum Linnaeus) to the New World. The "sweet spice" had been in demand since the Crusades, a product controlled by Arabic producers and traders. The Spanish realized the value of the commodity and gained some control when they removed the Berbers from Spain in 1492. Sugarcane grew well in the Caribbean, but it would not be until 1516 that the Spanish had a functioning sugar mill in the New World. [Click here to read more...]

posted: February 10, 2004

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The castor bean is not a bean, but the seed of the Palma Christi or castor bean plant (Ricinus communis Linnaeus). The seed contains the notorious ricin as well as an alkaloid, ricinine, and an agglutinin. But the seed also contains oil, up to 55 percent of the seed's weight is oil and it is one of the oldest commercial plant products. Castor oil along with olive oil provided the fuel for lamps in ancient Egypt and the Middle East more than 4,000 years ago. Castor oil is a pale yellow viscous fluid that burns steadily. Unlike olive oil (from Olea europaea L.), it does not become rancid unless exposed to very high temperatures. [Click here to read more...]

posted: January 27, 2004

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The berry ripens only during hot weather, a trait carried from its original habitat in tropical Africa. It is served as a dessert or in fruit salads; the sweet juicy flesh is red from its high lycopene content. The USDA estimates that in 2001, 4 billion pounds of the fruit were grown in the U.S. with most of that crop consumed domestically at 14.7 pounds per person. That crop's value at the time of shipping was $276.9 million dollars. The berry is the watermelon (Citrullus lanatus (Thunberg) Matsumura & Nakai). [Click here to read more...]

posted: January 20, 2004

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In 1621, the Dutch chartered the Westindiscke Compagnie (WIC) with high hopes of a second company having the financial success of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company). In 1626, Peter Minuit bought an island from the natives and began the settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam. The West India Company plied trade between Africa and the Americas, mostly the trade of humans as slaves. [Click here to read more...]

posted: January 13, 2004

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Cornelius Houtman's voyage to the East Indies suffered several disastrous losses. Yet when the surviving ships returned in 1597 to Texel, an island port of the Netherlands, the ships were loaded with valuable spices and had a treaty with a sultan in Java. The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) was chartered in 1602. In 1603, the Dutch blockaded, but never captured, the beautiful city of Goa; by 1605, most Portuguese traders were driven from the Spice Islands. [Click here to read more...]

posted: January 6, 2004

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By 1515, the Portuguese had a well-organized spice trade running between the East Indies and western Europe. Although the Portuguese controlled the major shipping and put down various rebellions in the islands, they did not replace the Hindu and Muslim traders in India and on the islands. Business was run by treaties between the Portuguese and the Sultanates. Still, the Asians rankled at the power and influence of the Portuguese outsiders. [Click here to read more...]

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