posted by chiron99 on Dec 1
On the world scale, tobacco smoking is relatively new. Before the Western European Renaissance, it was basically only smoked, as far as anyone can tell, in the Americas–though ancient Americans have kept the habit going for almost four thousand years. The type of plant on which all smokers necessarily depends is, quite possibly, at least twice that old.
Chemically speaking, tobacco (g. Nicotania) belongs to the Solanacea family–a designation which gives the genus at least eighteen hundred different relatives, some of them very distinguished indeed! To the Solanacea family belong varieties of herb, shrub, tree and climbing plant, most of them native to the continent of America. You can detect a certain family resemblance in these very different genera of Solanacea plants, in that many of them enjoyed a mixed reception when they were first introduced to Europe.
The tomato is part of the Solanacea family, too, and it’s only in recent times that Europeans, as well as Americans of European descent, have left off thinking of the tomato as a poisonous plant. These tomato-fearing Europeans perhaps confused the tomato with another, highly poisonous Solanacea vegetable, the deadly nightshade. Petunias, eggplants, chilis, and potatoes are also members of this varied family.
The habit of classifying plants and animals according to family, genus, species, etc., derives from one scientific genius, the eighteenth-century botanist Carolus Linnaeus. According to Linnaeus there were two plants belonging to the genus Nicotania (which is itself apparently named for Jean Nicot, the sixteenth-century French ambassador to Portugal who brought the art of tobacco smoking to France): Nicotania tabacum and Nicotania rustica. Of the two, N. rustica is, if you will, the father plant. Since Linnaeus’s time, over fifty other species of Nicotania have been discovered, but nobody smokes them (apart from certain long-ago Native Americans who gave the habit up as soon as N. tabacum and N. rustica became available). They are used, among other things, as chew (by certain native Australians), as decoration, and for their smell.
But if you want to smoke, it’s N. rustica or N. tabacum you’re after. Rustica, the parent plant, is smaller (like an elderly man who is dwarfed by his healthy, middle-aged son), rarely growing taller than three feet, with leaves that round rather than pointing at the tip, and smaller flowers. It’s assumed to have appeared first in Central America, and it was probably N. rustica that was being smoked when Europeans first encountered the practice–i.e. during Columbus’s maiden voyage to the Americas.
N. tabacum seems to have evolved, long before Columbus, in the Yucatan, where for centuries ancient Central Americans cultivated it. It evolved through cultivation, or so scholars think, given that it has never been discovered in the wild. But it has supplanted its parent plant as the primary ingredient in cigars, cigarettes, and pipe tobacco.
The story of tobacco since its discovery by Europeans has frequently repeated this pattern. White Burley tobacco, now predominant in American pipes and cigarettes, is a chance genetic variation on Red Burley tobacco, a once-ubiquitous strain of the plant so thoroughly eclipsed by White Burley that it eventually died out.
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