@sarahtaber 🥑🍄🥬 would be curious if you've seen this kinda thing before and if a more self-defined one would be useful somehow, or if its already been done elsewhere online somewhere.
When I look at it, I sense Pangea breaking apart with fragments differentiating.
I sense plant anatomy developing into ag, mouthfeels, and flavors we all love.
Branching to Dicots, the first significant branch contains spinach, which you can see is related to beets, and Peru-region Andean quinoa.
It also includes tasty weed purslane, which I just learned was used in 1818 in poultices to help feet, from OED. Amaranth here too.
Lots of sour rhubarb-y things here are fascinatingly placed near Buckwheat, which is used for flour.
In the next batch of Dicots:
First 🍇 grapes branch off on their own. I want to look at US grapes vs. Europe ones someday.
Then next big branch spans many delicious things across continents. Did you realize the pod-like 🍫Colombia-region Cacao, the mighty African Baobab tree's fruit, Egyptian-area Okra, and 🌺 Hibiscus all fall in one branch together?
Finally trees like 🍋lemons (all citrus, really), lychee, pistachios, and cashew fruit are not so distant.
Next another fruits cluster. And the infamous mustard-like 🥬brassica veggie group which was late to Americas via Columbian Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Pomegranate and clove clearly have shared plant structures. I can't say what guava & allspice have in common but I'll take it.
Cabbage here too. I'm impressed by how distant the mustard-likes are from the other major salad #agriculture veggies we know and love. 🥗Salads are true mixtures. (Just realized Swiss Chard was back with Amaranth)
I'm going to pause the thread here as we finish the right half in our clockwise journey.
All the edible things have clickable links to the Phytotheca site which has beautiful write-ups, multiple cultivar details, and even more photos inside.
@thadk I knew yams and sweet potatoes weren’t the same but wow, they’re entirely unrelated. Also, jicama is a LEGUME!! 🤯 I assumed it lived with radishes in brassica-land. (Coming at this as a cook/gardener, 100% not a biologist, obvs.) Then things like coriander on carrots makes perfect sense (and the kind of relationship you can “see” looking at the plants).
Very cool.
thadk
Scott Matheson