Curated playlist
Garden plants of Asia
- ApricotIn Egypt, "bukra filmishmish" means "tomorrow in apricot season." It answers a rash promise.
- PeachThe peach is named for Persia, yet every thread of its origin leads back to China.
- CoconutEvery coconut on a remote Pacific island arrived because a person brought it. Ocean currents alone could not do it.
- Date palmThe date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, has grown seven trees named Methuselah, Hannah, Adam, Judith, Boaz, Jonah and Uriel. Each one sprouted from a seed about 2000 years old that had been stored by accident. The seeds came from a cultivar…
- Ficus religiosaFicus religiosa, the sacred fig, is revered by four major religions at once. All four began in the Indian subcontinent.
- OliveThe olive, a subtropical evergreen tree that botanists call Olea europaea, once led the writer Georges Duhamel to remark that the "Mediterranean ends where the olive tree no longer grows." That is a large claim for a short, squat tree…
- Juglans regiaWitches were said to gather at a walnut tree in Benevento, Italy. A judge wrote about them in 1526.
- BambooBamboo includes Dendrocalamus sinicus, a giant whose single stalk can reach 46 m in length, 36 cm in diameter and 450 kg in weight. Yet every bamboo is a grass. Together they form the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. The…
- FigThe fig, the fruit of a tree known to botanists as Ficus carica, may have been the first plant that people ever grew on purpose. The evidence is nine small figs found at Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village in the Jordan Valley, 13 km…
- Ginkgo bilobaGinkgo biloba is a tree that lived through the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and simply kept growing. Six ginkgos there were among the few living things in the area to survive the blast. Almost every other plant and animal…
- Cherry blossomThe cherry blossom, known in Japan as sakura, begins its yearly march through the country in Okinawa in January. From there it climbs the archipelago, and the whole nation watches it go. For decades the movement of this cherry blossom…
- Ailanthus altissimaIn 1886, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, wrote an ordinance about a single kind of tree. Ailanthus altissima, known as the tree of heaven, was declared a public nuisance. Anyone who owned or occupied a lot where one grew faced a fine of 50…
- CitronAsk for a citron in a French market and you will be handed a lemon. The French word for the fruit that English speakers call a citron is cédrat, and the two languages have been confusing each other for centuries. The true citron, known to…