AMERICAN GARDENER

Petunias are among the most popular flowering annuals grown in gardens, containers, and hanging baskets around the world, prized for their trumpet-shaped blooms and nearly endless color range. Native to South America, particularly Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, petunias were brought to Europe in the early 1800s and quickly became a garden favorite due to … Read more

Picture: Dungeness Crab At California State Capitol Museum Crabs are one of the most diverse, most ecologically significant, and most commercially important groups of crustaceans on earth, encompassing over 7,000 recognized species distributed across every ocean, from the shallowest tropical coral reefs to the deepest abyssal trenches, as well as in freshwater rivers, lakes, and … Read more

Petunias are one of the most versatile, most colorful, and most widely used annual flowering plants in landscape design, offering an extraordinary range of flower colors, plant habits, and design applications that make them indispensable in gardens of virtually every style and scale. From cascading hanging baskets to formal bedding schemes, from window boxes to … Read more

Fenugreek is one of the oldest cultivated plants in human history, a remarkable dual-purpose herb and spice plant that simultaneously provides fresh leaves used as a vegetable herb in cooking, dried leaves used as a flavoring spice, and seeds used as one of the most important and widely traded spice seeds in South Asian, Middle … Read more

Turmeric is one of the most important, most widely cultivated, and most commercially significant spice and medicinal plants in the world, a tropical rhizome plant native to South and Southeast Asia that has been used in Indian cooking, Ayurvedic medicine, and Hindu religious ceremonies for over 4,000 years. Known as the golden spice for the … Read more

Parsley is one of the most widely grown and most universally consumed fresh herbs in the world, a bright, clean, versatile Mediterranean herb that has been cultivated for over 2,000 years across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Native to the central Mediterranean region — particularly Sardinia, Algeria, and Tunisia — it spread through Roman … Read more

Coriander is one of the most ancient, most widely cultivated, and most culturally significant herb and spice plants in the world, remarkable for being the only commonly used culinary plant where both the fresh leaves and the dried seeds are harvested as entirely distinct and commercially separate ingredients with fundamentally different flavors, aromas, and culinary … Read more

Sea moss is a type of red algae or seaweed that grows along the rocky Atlantic coastlines of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, harvested for centuries as a food, medicine, and industrial ingredient and experiencing an extraordinary surge in global popularity over the past decade as one of the most celebrated superfoods in the … Read more

Black pepper is the most widely traded and most universally used spice in the world, accounting for approximately 20 percent of the entire global spice trade by value and present as a table condiment and cooking ingredient in virtually every cuisine on earth. Native to the Malabar Coast of Kerala in southwestern India, where it … Read more