Curated playlist
Fiber plants
- CottonMedieval Europeans imagined cotton grew on a tree that bore tiny lambs.
- BananaAlmost every banana eaten in the Western world is a single seedless clone. That sameness is its greatest weakness.
- FlaxFlax fibers spun and knotted about 30,000 years ago are the oldest known worked plant fiber.
- SoybeanThe soybean, known to botanists as Glycine max, is a legume native to East Asia, and in June 1973 the United States briefly refused to sell it abroad. Traders had misread the soybean futures market, which wrongly signaled a major shortage.…
- Gossypium hirsutumRoughly 90% of the world's cotton comes from one plant, upland cotton. Its scientific name is Gossypium hirsutum.
- Gossypium barbadenseOne mild winter in 1785 let Georgia planters finally grow Sea Island cotton.
- HempPeople were already spinning hemp into usable fiber 50,000 years ago, which makes it one of the first plants ever turned into thread. Alongside bamboo, it also ranks among the fastest growing plants on Earth. Hemp is a group of Cannabis…
- OkraOkra, known to botanists as Abelmoschus esculentus, is a plant that most people meet only as a green pod on a plate. In parts of the English-speaking world it goes by the name lady's fingers. Those pods are green in most plants and red in…
- Asimina trilobaAsimina triloba, the American pawpaw, is a small deciduous tree of eastern North American forests that bears a fruit with a custard-like texture. Ohio botanist William B. Werthner once wrote that the fruit is sweet and a little puckery,…
- Urtica dioicaUrtica dioica, the common stinging nettle, owes part of its modern fame to a boast made by one farmer to another in 1986. The two were neighbours, and each insisted that his own land had the worse nettle infestation. One of them finally…