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Enigma to solve
This elegant small broom was bought in France on a flee market. I ignore its country of origin and the botanical identity of the fiber. The detail photo shows that the fiber is ramified, which could point to the pedicels of a grass panicle. Who has an idea ?
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The plant of the month: Borassus flabellifer
I have long been intrigued by this unusual vegetable sold in all the Indian groceries near Gare du Nord in Paris. No book was able to help me identify it, and I could obtain no Indian name, until in a restaurant, they told me that it came from a palm.
Digging into the fabulous encyclopedia The Wealth of India allowed me to find a photo. It was the seedling of Borassus flabellifer, one of the commonest sugar palm. The seed develops this conical organ below ground, before setting any leaf. It seems that seedlings are produced commercially in southern India and Sri-Lanka.
If you know more about cultivation and cooking, please tell us !
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.
Pages with content
This website being still new, its content is limited to some sets of pages, elaborated to serve as examples. You can access them directly by clicking on the following links which can go to the French or the English version, depending on the resource:
- Le Floc'h, Tunisian ethnobotany
- Vilmorin-Andrieux, Les meilleurs blés, catalogue of wheats in the early 1900's
- Candolle, Origin of cultivated plants. 1882
- Garcia da Orta, Coloquios dos simples. 1563.
- Introduction to names in the world languages
- Common names of crops in European languages
- Pulses
- Cereals
- Oil plants
- Phaseolus species
- Diospyros species
- Plants used for beads
- Plants used for soap
- Nabatean agriculture