Select African Diaspora Plant Inventory (Part 4)

Welcome to the fourth installment of our Select African Diaspora Plant Inventory. We have assembled more than 100 plants from various sources - books, publications, prototype gardens and conferences in order to identify plants that inextricably connected to the descendants of the Middle Passage and the peoples of West Africa.

Fish Pepper - Capsicum annuum

The enslavement of West Africans to provide labor for the economic engine for European nations and the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean. Africans who landed on these shores adapted their agricultural knowledge to newfound conditions - on large-scale agricultural productions on plantations, on plantation subsistence gardens they created to supplement their own food needs and in villages of freed slaves who fled from their captors and created their own agricultural economies to sustain their maroon communities.

Our select African Diaspora plant inventory is currently North American and Caribbean-centric.  We will eventually add more plants from the gardening scene in West Africa, the Caribbean and South America.

Select African Diaspora Plant Inventory - Part 4 (P - R)

Abidjan, Ivory Coast – Local vendors with their products in the commune of Adjamé, Abidjan.

PLANT	CLASS	BACKGROUND / ORIGINS	SOURCE
Pepper (hot):    Buena Mulata, Fish Pepper;  Ole Pepperpot	Capsicum annuum	Collected and preserved by painter Horace Pippin and reintroduced by William Woys Weaver.	NYBG-African-American; Truelove Seeds;  Sistah Seeds; 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From - 2000 (W.W. Weaver)
Pepper (hot):   Aji Dulce, Chocolate seven pot, Scotch Bonnet, Tobago, Trinidad seven pot, West Indies Red	Capsicum chinense		NYBG-African-American;  NYBG-Caribbean;  100 Vegetables - 2000 (W.W. Weaver)
Pepper (hot):   Mboga, Tabasco;  Piri Piri Pepper Mix (African Bird’s Eye Chili)	Capsicum frutescens	Vegetable pepper Zanzibar	Farming While Black - 2018 (L. Penniman);  NYBG-Caribbean;  Sistah Seeds
Pepper (hot):  Melegueta Pepper	Aframomum melegueta		In the Shadow of Slavery - 2009 (J. Carney)
Pepper (low heat):  Trinidad Seasoning Pepper	Capsicum Chinese	Popular cooking pepper in Trinidad and Tobago	Sistah Seeds
Parsley:  Giant of Italy	Petroselinum crispum		NYBG-Caribbean
Pea:  Red peas, Sea Island;  Purple Hull Pinkeye,  Sea Island Rice Pea; Ezell Family Fish Eye Blackeyed Pea, Brown Crowder, Iron and Clay, First Lady Northern, Whippoorwill	Vigna unguiculata	West Africa; Gullah Geechee variety;  Beecher red pea	Truelove Seeds;  Sistah Seeds; Farming While Black - 2018 (L. Penniman);  NYBG-African-American;  NYBG-Caribbean;  Heirloom Vegetable Gardening - 2018 (W.W. Weaver);   Colonial Williamsburg Sankofa Heritage Garden
Pea:  Pigeon peas, Gandules, Gungo peas	Cajanus cajan	Gandules in Spanish;  Gungo peas in Jamaica	NYBG-Caribbean;  Truelove Seeds
Plantain	Plantago major		NYBG-African-American
Plantain:  Dwarf Puerto Rican	Musa		NYBG-Caribbean
Potato:  Irish Potato	Solanum tuberosum		NYBG-African-American
Potato:  Dazo/Fingerling	Plectranthus esculentus	West Africa	In the Shadow of Slavery - 2009 (J. Carney)
Potato:  Hausa potato/piasa	Solenostemon rotundifolius	West Africa;  Edible underground	In the Shadow of Slavery - 2009 (J. Carney)
Potato, Sweet Potato:   Beauregard, Boniato, Pumpkin yam sweet potato	Ipomoea batatas	“Diasporic King of Crops”;  in North America, sweet potatoes became a substitute for true yams from Africa;  Boniato is a sweet potato with dry, white flesh	NYBG-African-American;  Farming While Black;  NYBG-Caribbean;  100 Vegetables - (W.W. Weaver);  Colonial Williamsburg Sankofa Heritage Garden
Pumpkin:   Calabaza, Haitian pumpkin	Cucurbita moschata	Joumou pumpkin	NYBG-Caribbean;  Farming While Black - 2018 (L. Penniman);  Heirloom Vegetable Gardening - (W.W. Weaver)
Pumpkin:  Fluted pumpkin	Telfairia occidentalis	West Africa	In the Shadow of Slavery - 2009 (J. Carney)
Purslane	Portulaca oleracea		NYBG-African-American
Rabbits tobacco:  Sweet everlasting	Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium		NYBG-African-American
Rice	Oryza Glaberrima		Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas - 2001 (J. Carney)
Rice:  Buffalo, Carolina Gold, Djubuh, M’Bale, WAB 56-104	Oryza Sativa		NYBG-Caribbean;  Black Rice - 2001 (J. Carney)