The Big, Bad Book of Botany

by Michael Largo

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  Baby Carrots

  What we market today as “baby carrots” are actually regular-size carrots that are sculpted, shaved, and placed in tumbling devices to give them a soft rounded shape, before being soaked in a solution of water and chlorine.

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  The main antioxidants in carrots are carotenoids, alpha- and beta-carotenes, lutein, ferulic acid, coumaric acid, hydroxycinnamic acid, caffeic acid, cyanidins, anthocyanins, and malvidins. They make carrots useful in preventing cancer and heart disease, and particularly beneficial to improving vision. The beta-carotenes are converted into vitamin A in the liver and are then transformed again in the retina to rhodopsin, a purple pigment the eye needs for good night vision.

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  CASHEW

  Anacardium occidentale

  The World’s Nut

  The cashew is a tasty nut and fleshy fruit of the Anacardiaceae family. The family comprises 73 genera and about 600 species, including mango, poison oak, poison ivy, pistachio, spondias, varnish tree, tannin, and Brazilian pepper. The cashew is a native of tropical South America (northeastern Brazil) in the region between the Amazon and Atlantic rain forests.

  From There to Everywhere

  Domestic cultivation of the cashew began well before the end of fifteenth century along the coast of northeastern Brazil. However, European traders and explorers didn’t record its discovery until 1578. Also in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese introduced the cashew to the west coast of India and southeast Africa. They first brought the plant to Goa and then spread it along western India and to Southeast Asia. Ranked as the number one tree nut crop in the world, cashews are commercially produced in thirty-two countries, on more than 7.5 million acres, particularly in tropical areas like Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, East Africa (Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya), and Australia. India, Vietnam, Brazil, and Nigeria are the world’s leading cashew producers.

  An Orgy of Flowers and Nuts

  Well adapted to tropical climates, the cashew tree can achieve heights of between 32 and 40 feet in favorable conditions. The tree is evergreen with a dense, symmetrical, spreading canopy and irregularly shaped trunk. The leaves are green and spirally arranged, with a short stalk termed a petiole. Leaves are elliptical, leathery, and generally 6 to 7 inches long with a rounded or notched tip. The tree’s flowers appear at the head of new batches of leaves, a flowering that occurs the most in tropical climates that are wet on and off throughout the year. Cashew flowers grow in a panicle format, appearing on stalks that branch out from numerous points of the main stem. Each of these panicles has a mix of bisexual flowers, containing both male and female parts, as well as strictly gendered flowers. Small and pale green in color at first (made of five yellowish green sepals and five slender, acute petals), the flower will eventually turn a reddish color. Both male and bisexual flowers have a single large stamen and five to nine smaller stamens. The flowers at the ends of the panicles bloom at a rate of 200 to 1,400 during one season. The bisexual flowers are self-fertilizing, though their pollination still depends on the transporting movements of either insects or the wind.

  The actual, botanically distinct cashew fruit is a kidney-shaped nut that grows externally in a double-walled shell, surrounding an edible kernel more colloquially known as “the cashew nut.” Initially, proper cashew nuts are pinkish in color, subsequently changing to green, greenish gray, and finally a grayish brown. Cashews are usually roasted or boiled before consumption, important for removing the toxic oil cardol, which occurs naturally within. At the time of maturity, the stalk or pedicle above the nut becomes swollen and fleshy, to form the pear-shaped accessory fruit, which precedes the actual nut or cashew fruit. This swollen peduncle, or pear-like structure, grows behind the real fruit, eventually yielding the cashew nut. The pulpy, juicy pseudo-fruit, usually called the “cashew apple” or “cashew fruit,” has a strong, sweet flavor and is also edible. Fresh or frozen cashew fruits are eaten raw or used as concentrates in beverages.

  Benefits from Head to Toe and in Between

  Cashew nuts are rich in calories and filled with soluble dietary fiber, health-promoting phytochemicals, vitamins, pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), riboflavin, pyridoxine (vitamin B6), and thiamin (vitamin B1). They boast a laundry list of minerals, including manganese, zinc, potassium, copper, iron, selenium, and magnesium, all known to help promote health in various ways. The seeds are also enriched in monounsaturated fatty acids like palmitoleic and oleic acids, which enhance a healthy blood lipid profile. Apart from this, the nuts also carry trace amounts of a flavonoid antioxidant (zeaxanthin), which protects against macular degeneration in the elderly. The fruit juice of the cashew is medicinally useful in fighting influenza, while the tree’s leaves, brewed as tea, make a potent diarrhea remedy. The bark, seeds, and leaves have also found use as an antiseptic vaginal douche, an antifungal agent for sores and rashes, and as an antipyretic agent or fever reducer—they’re even effective in treating worms, and can be formulated to kill botfly larvae growing under human skin. In the history of traditional medicine, some used the cashew plant to treat snakebites, cracked heels, eczema, venereal diseases, psoriasis, scrofula, dyspepsia, intestinal colic, leishmaniasis, and syphilis-related skin disorders.

  Even beyond its pharmacy of medical applications, cashew seed oil has industrial applications as well, proving a useful material in wood preservatives and plastics, and as a protective resin or coating agent applied to fishing nets.

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  The English word cashew originally derived from Brazil’s native Tupi tribe, who called it caju, meaning “a nut that forms on its own.” Other common names for cashew include merey in Venezuela, acaju in Brazil, cajuil in Spain, and noix de cajou in France.

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  CASTOR OIL BUSH

  Ricinus communis

  Nature’s Night-Light

  The history of sedentary human civilization is directly connected to cultivation—transforming wild plants into useful domestic species. Humankind roamed the earth chasing meat, but it was the plant kingdom that allowed us to settle down, all the while nurturing the expansion of culture and our planetary dominance every step of the way. None would deny the critical role plants have played in the development of our species. Not just a renewable form of sustenance for us (as well as our all-important livestock), plants are also crucial ingredients in many lifesaving medicines and have given us the raw materials that fostered industrialization and made modern-day society and technology possible. The castor oil bush is one such example. We owe the course of our species’s history to this amazing plant, indigenous and economically important to India, the Mediterranean basin, and eastern Africa.

  Long Before Edison

  The castor oil bush plant, botanically named Ricinus communis, belongs to the flowering spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. Ricinus (Latin for “tick”) comes from the morphological appearance of castor oil seeds, which resemble certain Mediterranean ticks, particularly when engorged with blood. The use of the castor oil bush dates back to 4000 B.C., which we know from evidence of the seeds in Egyptian tombs to fuel oil lamps. This first fuel allowed humans to continue indoor activities when night fell, inevitably expanding social contacts and culture. Herodotus, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and other Greek travelers documented the use of castor seed oil for body ointments, lighting, and as a purgative. In India, castor bean oil, called eranda, has been in use since 2000 B.C., often for burning in lamps or in open bowls with a wick, as well as being used as an unguent, laxative, and purgative. In traditional ethnomedical systems such as Ayurved, Unani, and Chinese medicine, castor oil is renowned as a cathartic and is often prescribed for arthritic diseases.

  The castor oil bush plant is a robust, suckering perennial shrub that may grow to the size of a small tree, as high as 39 feet, when treated to full sunlight, heat, and adequate moisture. It favors sandy soil but can vary greatly and adapt its growth ha
bit and appearance to meet a number of different environmental conditions. Most often, people cultivate castor oil in tropical and temperate regions.

  The leaves or foliage are large, glossy, and palmately lobed, placed alternately on the stem with a long stalk. The lobes of the leaves are generally 6 to 8 inches across. Cultivated varieties have their own characteristic colorations, including black-purplish, off-dark reddish purple or bronze, reddish, dark red-metallic, bronze-green, maroon, bright green with white veins, and just plain green. This vastly expanded range of colors gives castor plants a beautiful ornamental look. The flowers occur throughout the year and are monoecious (separated male and female flowers on the same plant), oriented in dense terminal clusters. The male flowers grow on the under portion of the spike and are yellowish green in color, with numerous branched, prominent, creamy stamens. The female flowers appear at the upper part of the spike and have prominent red stigmata, the sticky parts of the flower where the pollen is deposited for fertilization.

  Not for Raw Munching

  The castor fruit is a spiny, greenish, deeply grooved capsule full of large, oval, laterally compressed beanlike seeds. Despite the name castor bean for its seed, the castor seed is not a true bean. At maturity, the seedpod, or capsule, dries and splits into three slices called carpels; upon splitting the seeds are forcibly ejected. The shiny castor beans have very beautiful, intricate external markings, with a small warty appendage at one end called a caruncle. The caruncle aids both in the dispersal of seeds and the absorption of water during planting. The caruncles are like small warts but they contain lipids and proteins, in addition to absorbing water rapidly. The caruncle oozes a gooey, oily substance that attracts ants, which then help in seed dispersal. Castor beans contain a highly poisonous and toxic substance called ricin, one of the most potent cytotoxins in nature. Ricin is known as a ribosome-inactivating protein, which means it kills off organelle sites of protein synthesis, called ribosomes. The reaction to toxic castor seeds is quite complicated and includes the clumping and breakdown (hemolysis) of red blood cells, and hemorrhaging in the digestive tract, which causes irreparable damage to vital organs such as the liver and kidneys. A dosage the size of only a few grains of sand will kill an adult within a few days.

  From Light to Flight

  Despite its toxicity, the castor oil bush has several medicinal benefits and numerous other applications when prepared correctly. The alcoholic extract of the castor leaf is known to protect the liver from damage against certain poisons. The root bark extracts of castor show analgesic, antihistamine, and anti-inflammatory properties. The bush can also act as a host plant for insects like the castor butterfly and silk moth, and other species in the Lepidoptera order even use it as a source of food for their larvae. For humans, the most important use of the castor plant has been the thick, almost colorless oil obtained from pressing the seeds. Though ancient man used it mostly to light up dark nights, there are an astonishing number of contemporary applications for the oil. It is found in cosmetics, soaps, dyes, coatings, lubricants, hydraulics, paints, inks, cold-resistant plastics, brake fluids, waxes, polishes, nylon, perfumes, and many pharmaceuticals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration even approves castor oil as a “generally recognized as safe and effective” over-the-counter laxative. Castor oil and its derivatives (such as Kolliphor EL, a polyethoxylated castor oil) are added to many modern drugs, such as miconazole (antifungal agent), paclitaxel (anticancer drug), Sandimmune (immunosuppressant agent), and nelfinavir mesylate (HIV protease inhibitor). Due to its viscosity at low temperatures and effectiveness at higher heats, castor oil makes a good lubricant for race car and jet engines.

  CELERY

  Apium graveolens

  The Green Wealth

  Celery is one of the most popular vegetables in the world, and its reputation only continues to grow as more and more people discover its many nutritional assets. Celery stalks are a common food, but its leaves, fresh or dried, are also used as a flavoring. Its spectrum of green colors starts as a lime-like whitish color just above the roots, getting light green as its stalk grows upward, where it sprouts deep green leaves. The darker the leaves, the richer the nutritional value. Celery seeds are dark brown, have a flavorful and spicy taste, and produce an essential oil that people combine with salt (sodium nitrate) and market as a spice called “celery salt.” A favorite among chefs, celery salt enhances the flavor of the famous Bloody Mary cocktail and is a distinctive ingredient of Chicago-style hot dogs. The French are known to specifically use celery as an ingredient for mirepoix, a base for soups and sauces.

  Carl Linnaeus gives the first scientific description celery in his Species Plantarum, but the valuable plant was long known to ancient civilizations. Tutankhamen’s tomb contained celery leaves, and evidence of their use has even been discovered among the ruins of the Greek city known as the Heraion of Samos, dating back to the seventh century B.C. Homer’s Iliad mentions Myrmidons’ horses running over wild celery around Troy, while in the Odyssey, the plant appears surrounding Calypso’s cave. Alexander the Great always deviated from his path of conquest when he learned of nearby celery fields; he ate celery for its healing properties more than as a food source. In A.D. 30, Aulus Celsus, a Roman encyclopedist known for his tome De Medicina, mentions a formula using celery seeds for pain relief.

  Celery belongs to the family of Apiceae and grows up to 3 feet tall. Its leaves are pinnate, resembling a feather, and reach approximately 3 inches long and about half as wide. Its creamy white flowers bloom in dense umbels and have a diameter of one inch. The seeds are brown, ball shaped, and tiny. Celery has a long growing season of about 125 days, which does not make it the easiest plant to bring to maturity. It requires rich soil with neutral pH, prefers moderate and cool temperatures, constant moisture, and full or partial sun exposure. It doesn’t tolerate extreme heat, preferring cool nights, and will wither at the hint of frost.

  Celery cultivation varies in method; its seeds are typically sown in protected greenhouses. Once the new sprouts reach about six inches, farmers plant them in deep trenches requiring intense irrigation during the entire growing season. For summer gardens, the temperature needs to be about 55 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit before outdoor planting will be effective. In commercial fields, the celery harvest starts when the average size is uniform at about 12 to 14 inches tall, after which the crop must be stored in temperatures of 32 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit. The quality and subsequent packing of celery are determined by size, color, shape, thickness, and straightness. If it is cultivated correctly, much of the plant’s nutritional value remains, though it’s best to eat celery stalks within seven days after picking to get the full spectrum of health benefits. The plant contains at least a dozen beneficial antioxidants and has a super-low caloric content. A three-pound bunch of celery has only 3 grams of carbohydrates, 1.6 grams of fiber, and 0.7 grams of protein, and six calories per stalk. Its list of vitamins looks like a shelf in a supplement store, and includes vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, E, and K; celery’s other nutrients include thiamin, niacin, folate, calcium, iron, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, potassium, and zinc.

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  The word celery was first used in English in 1664 and comes from the Italian seleri, which derives from the Latin selinon and the Mycenaean Greek word serino.

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  CHINESE JUNIPER

  Juniperus chinensis

  Elegance in Nature

  As its name indicates, this evergreen tree (or shrub) grows primarily in China, but it can also be found throughout Northeast Asia, including Japan, Mongolia, and Korea, as well as southeastern Russia. A fixation for many artists, the juniper frequently appears in ancient Chinese drawings and in minimalistic Japanese Zen paintings. Bonsai gardeners also favor the plant, and many cultures admire it for its aesthetic value.

  The Chinese juniper grows in the wild to varying heights, 3 to 60 feet tall. However, none seems to have the exact same shape as the next; each forms a unique, individualistic s
wirl of branches in some variation of an oval or pyramid. Juniper is a green coniferous shrub with needlelike leaves growing only ¼ inch long and sharp to the touch. The plant blooms brown and yellow in spring, bringing forth beautifully soft, medium-green fragrant foliage, all of which shape the environment into a noble sight.

  Chinese juniper prefers partial or full sun exposure and sandy or clay-rich soul with an alkaline pH. Planting shouldn’t be too deep, yet the hole should be dug to a size that is twice the width of the root ball, or even wider, and no soil should be placed over it, though some organic matter will allow it to take root faster. Place about 3 inches of a thick layer of fertilizer on the area around the plant to maximize growth, keeping it 10 inches from the trunk. This way, rainwater and air can easily reach the root, though the trunk stays dry. Regular irrigation in the first growth season can speed up the process, though overall, the juniper matures very slowly.

  Juniperus chinensis has more than 100 cultivars, each displaying different ornamental effects. The most common are Tremonia and Aurea, which have fabulous yellow foliage, followed by the Shoosmith, with its permanent juvenile foliage; there are also the columnar crown shape variation named Columnaris, the Kazuka with abundant cones, the golden Chinese juniper or Aurea, then Blaauw, Pyramidalis, Grey Owl, and Plumosa aurea. Juniperus pfitzeriana is a popular hybrid between Juniperus sabina and Juniperus chinensis, though it never grows beyond a shrub, making it best for smaller gardens.