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the wiki about useful plants and plant uses

Books

Los chiles que le dan sabor al mundo, 2018. IRD

Chiles en México. Historias, culturas y ambientes, 2022. IRD

Chiles, ajíes y pimentas. Capsicum en el Caribe, Centro y Sudamérica, 2024. Universidad Veracruzana

No less than three collective books did Esther Katz and her collaborators publihed in the last years about chiles Capsicum, in Mexico for the first two and all tropical America for the last. A broad historical, ethnobotanical and culinary synthesis for products which are an important part of the cultural heritage of those countries and have spread worldwide.

• Chiles, ajíes y pimentas. Capsicum en el Caribe, Centro y Sudamérica, 2024. Coordinación general de Esther Katz, Marco Antonio Vásquez Dávila, Araceli Aguilar Meléndez, Gladys Isabel Manzanero Medina. Universidad Veracruzana. 400 p. ISBN 978-607-8969-80-7
• Chiles en México. Historias, culturas y ambientes, 2022. Sous la direction de Marco Antonio Vásquez Dávila, Esther Katz, Araceli Aguilar Meléndez, Gladys Isabel Manzanero Medina. IRD Éditions / Universidad Veracruzana. 358 p. ISBN 978-2-7099-2933-2. available freely in pdf.
• Los chiles que le dan sabor al mundo, 2018. Sous la direction de Maria Reyna Hernández Colorado, Araceli Aguilar Meléndez, Esther Katz, Marco Antonio Vásquez Dávila. IRD Éditions / Universidad Veracruzana. 318 p. ISBN 978-607-5026992. available freely in pdf.

Michel Chauvet
8 October 2025

What about Pl@ntUse?

The site Biowikifarm, which hosted Pl@ntUse, suffered a cyberattaque in 2021. It has been unavailable for a long time, and the Berlin Museum of natural history gave up the management of Biowikifarm. Thanks to my colleagues of Pl@ntNet, the site could be recovered, and is now available via CIRAD.

Pl@ntUse has great ambitions but limited manpower. You will find on this page some examples of useful tasks. If you wish to collaborate, tell me and I will indicate the procedure, which is unfortunately not simple for cybersecurity reasons.

If you feel reluctant with the Mediawiki software, no problem. I can help you step by step. By doing so, you will get out of the prevailing pessimism, and participate to the collaborative building of a tool useful to everybody.

Michel Chauvet
5 October 2025

Curiosa

Why is seringat the French name of Philadelphus coronarius, whereas lilac bears the name Syringa ? My perplexity doubled when I read that this name came from the use of hollow branchlets to make… seringes ! This was the beginning of a long etymological search, that we detail in our Etymological dictionary. But this quest ended up in an enigma.

Renaissance botanists used to group several plants with frangrant flowers under the name Syringa. For instance, Bauhin in his Pinax (1623) distinguishes Syringa cærulea, which is lilac, Syringa vulgaris; Syringa alba, which is seringat (mock orange), Philadelphus coronarius; and Syringa Arabica foliis mali arantii, which is sambac, Jasminum sambac. It seems in fact that the name Syringa was first applied to the mock orange, but Linnaeus decided another way. This answers the first question.

mock orange flowers

As to the second question, you must know that the etymon of medieval Latin syringa is Greek σῦριγξ, -ιγγος - surinx, - ingos, which meant in ancient Greek "flute" or "fistula". In medieval Latin, this "flute" or "pipe" came to designate a "seringe". But in fact, we must not understand our hypodermical or intravenous seringes. Every pipe through wich a liquid was pushed was called a syringa, which applies to seringes for rectum or uretra enema !

The object size fits indeed more, but it seems that this meaning is not the right one. Tabernaemontanus may give us the right explanation in 1625 in his Neuw Vollkommentlich Kreuterbuch : "the branchlets can be used as a whistle (or flute), by removing the marrow". This explanation is highly plausible. What remains is to check it experimentally. If you have a lilac or a mock orange in your garden, cut off a branchlet, scoop out the soft heart, and blow into it to see (or hear) the result. Give us then the answer on the ethnobotany forum of Tela Botanica.

Michel Chauvet

What is Pl@ntUse?

Pl@ntuse is a collaborative space for exchange of information on useful plants and uses of plants. It is not intended to duplicate existing encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), but to offer additional features such as:

• On-line resources that you can reuse
• Portal towards relevant resources available on Internet
• Thematic introductions to literature or any subject of interest
• Species lists (legumes grown in France, world cereals...)
• Popular names or vernacular names
• Portrait galeries of cultivars (varieties)
• Old books and articles on useful plants
• Original publications
• Iconography
• Questions and answers

The working method

It is of course scalable and open for discussion. But the basic idea is not to produce consensus summaries. It is rather to provide reliable material to allow everyone to make his/her own synthesis. A priority is to upload the data sets that underlie the work, but are rarely published, forcing everyone to start from scratch.

Any kind of page may be created. Templates have been devised to create pages with a similar structure and with similar content. Such pages are easily accessible through categories or portals. If you intend to upload new types of information, please ask the administrators, who will help you create and use a new template.

As is customary in the scientific community, we mention the author of each contribution. However, most of the contributions may be corrected or updated, as far as they reach consensus. See Help:Authors of contributions

Each page is potentially available in English and French. By default, we are beginning with French, except for books written in English. You can collaborate by translating.