Turmeric is a flowering plant, Curcuma longa of the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, the roots of which are used in cooking. The plant is a perennial, rhizomatous, herbaceous plant native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, that requires temperatures between 20 and 30 °C and a considerable amount of annual rainfall to thrive. Plants are gathered each year for their rhizomes, some for propagation in the following season and some for consumption.
The Zingiberales are flowering plants forming one of four orders in the commelinids clade of monocots, together with its sister order, Commelinales. The order includes 68 genera and 2,600 species. Zingiberales are a unique though morphologically diverse order that has been widely recognised as such over a long period of time. They are usually large herbaceous plants with rhizomatous root systems and lacking an aerial stem except when flowering. Flowers are usually large and showy, and the stamens are often modified (staminodes) to also form colourful petal-like structures that attract pollinators.
Zingiberaceae or the ginger family is a family of flowering plants made up of about 50 genera with a total of about 1600 known species of aromatic perennial herbs with creeping horizontal or tuberous rhizomes distributed throughout tropical Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Members of the family Zingiberaceae including turmeric, ginger, Javanese ginger, and galangal have been used for centuries in traditional medicine. Preclinical studies of Zingiberaceae extracts have shown analgesic properties.
Ginger is a flowering plant whose rhizome, ginger root or ginger, is widely used as a spice and a folk medicine. It is a herbaceous perennial which grows annual pseudostems about one meter tall bearing narrow leaf blades. The inflorescences bear flowers having pale yellow petals with purple edges, and arise directly from the rhizome on separate shoots.
Boesenbergia rotunda, Thai กระชาย krachai, commonly known as Chinese keys, fingerroot, lesser galangal or Chinese ginger, is a medicinal and culinary herb from China and Southeast Asia. In English, the root has traditionally been called fingerroot, because the shape of the rhizome resembles that of fingers growing out of a center piece.
Cypripedium is a genus of 58 species and nothospecies of hardy orchids; it is one of five genera that together compose the subfamily of lady's slipper orchids (Cypripedioideae). They are widespread across much of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of Europe and Africa (Algeria), Russia, China, Central Asia, Canada the United States, Mexico, and Central America. They are most commonly known as slipper orchids or lady's slipper orchids; other common names include moccasin flower, camel's foot, squirrel foot, steeple cap, Venus' shoes, and whippoorwill shoe. An abbreviation used in trade journals is "Cyp." The genus name is derived from Ancient Greek Κύπρις (Kúpris), an early reference in Greek myth to Aphrodite, and πέδιλον (pédilon), meaning "sandal".
The genus Zingiber is native to Southeast Asia especially in Thailand, China, the Indian Subcontinent, and New Guinea. It contains the true gingers, plants grown the world over for their medicinal and culinary value. The most well known are Z. officinale and Z. mioga, two garden gingers.
Nathaniel Wolff Wallich FRS FRSE was a surgeon and botanist of Danish origin who worked in India, initially in the Danish settlement near Calcutta and later for the Danish East India Company and the British East India Company. He was involved in the early development of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, describing many new plant species and developing a large herbarium collection which was distributed to collections in Europe. Several of the plants that he collected were named after him.
Plantae Asiaticae Rariores is a horticultural work published in 1830–1832 by the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich.
Zingiber zerumbet is a species of plant in the ginger family with leafy stems growing to about 1.2 m (3.9 ft) tall. It originates from Asia, but can be found in many tropical countries. Common names include: awapuhi, bitter ginger, shampoo ginger and pinecone ginger.
Asarum canadense, commonly known as Canada wild ginger, Canadian snakeroot, and broad-leaved asarabacca, is a herbaceous, perennial plant which forms dense colonies in the understory of deciduous forest throughout its native range in eastern North America, from the Great Plains east to the Atlantic Coast, and from southeastern Canada south to around the Fall Line in the southeastern United States.
Apostasia wallichii, commonly known as the yellow grass orchid, is a species of orchid that is native to India, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, New Guinea and northern Australia. It has many arching, dark green, grass-like leaves and up to forty small, star-like yellow flowers arranged on a branched flowering stem. It mainly grows in wet forest and rainforest.
In biology, determination is the process of matching a specimen of an organism to a known taxon, for example identifying a plant. The term is also used in cellular biology, where it means the act of the differentiation stem cells becoming fixed. Various methods are used, for example single-access keys or multi-access keys.
Kaempferia rotunda is a plant species in the ginger family. It is native to China, the Indian subcontinent, Indochina, and widely cultivated elsewhere. It is reportedly naturalized in Java, Malaysia and Costa Rica.
Alpinia nigra is a medium-sized herb belonging to the ginger family. The rhizome is well known in many Asian cultures as a medicinal and culinary item. In many Asian tribal communities it is a part of the diet along with rice.
Iris subg. Nepalensis is one subgenus of Iris, also known as 'Himalayan irises'. It was formerly genus Junopsis.
Costus curvibracteatus is a tropical rhizomatous perennial native to Costa Rica and Panama. A member of the spiral ginger family of plants, its common name is orange tulip ginger. It is also sometimes referred to as spiral ginger; however, this common name is better associated with Costus barbatus, a more widely cultivated and very similar species. Despite the name and its relation to the ginger family (Zingiberaceae), the rhizomes of the orange tulip ginger are not edible.
Abelmoschus crinitus is a species of flowering plant belonging to the mallow family. It was first described by Nathaniel Wallich in 1830.
Dendrobium densiflorum is a species of epiphytic or lithophytic orchid, native to Asia. It has club-shaped stems, three or four leathery leaves and densely flowered, hanging bunches of relatively large pale yellow and golden yellow flowers.
Rungiah aka Rungia or Rungia Raju was a 19th-century Indian botanical illustrator, noted for producing a large number of images for Robert Wight's books on Indian flora. The Raju family were painters of the Kshatriya caste of Tanjore, and were originally from the Telugu-speaking region in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
