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Ten Plants That Shook the World
The magazine, Garden Design, had an article in early or mid 1998, entitled, "Ten Plants That Shook the World." We're not going to reprint it here, because we don't have the copyright. But it's a fascinating magazine with a fascinating article from which we post the excerpts you see below.
Plant |
Comments |
| Bamboo | Used as food, furniture, shipbuilding materials, and medicine |
| Cotton | Use as clothing and fiber; a real cash crop |
| Olives | The main export of ancient Greece, and the reason for the travel that expanded Western Civilization. Also the primary lubricant of the Industrial Revolution |
| Papyrus | Early paper--and the records we now have of ancient writings |
| Pepper | Once the global currency |
| Quinine | Once the only known remedy for malaria |
| Rubber | A vegetable gum used for rubbing out pencil marks, until discovery by the auto industry |
| Sugarcane | Brought to the west by medievel spice traders; the first African slaves came to America to work this crop , not cotton |
| Tea | Ah, the Boston Tea Party! |
| Wheat | Along with rice, the primary source of human nourishment |
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