Rutgers Gardens, New Brunswick, NJ - USA

Abelmoschus moschatus (Abelmosk, Ambrette seeds, Annual hibiscus, Bamia Moschata, Galu Gasturi, Muskdana, Musk mallow, Musk okra, Musk seeds, Ornamental okra, Rose mallow seeds, Tropical jewel hibiscus, Yorka okra; syn. Hibiscus abelmoschus L.) is an aromatic and medicinal plant in the Malvaceae family, which is native to India.

Okra (US /ˈoʊkrə/ or UK /ˈɒkrə/; Abelmoschus esculentus Moench), known in many English-speaking countries as lady's fingers, bhindi or gumbo, is a flowering plant in the mallow family. It is valued for its edible green seed pods. The geographical origin of okra is disputed, with supporters of South Asian, Ethiopian and West African origins. The plant is cultivated in tropical, subtropical and warm temperate regions around the world.

This is a list of plants that have a culinary role as vegetables. "Vegetable" can be used in several senses, including culinary, botanical and legal. This list includes botanical fruits such as pumpkins, and does not include herbs, spices, cereals and most culinary fruits and culinary nuts. Currently, edible fungi are not included on this list. Legal vegetables are defined for regulatory, tax and other purposes. Examples include tomatoes, which are a botanical berry, but a culinary vegetable for US tax purposes, and even tomato sauce as found on pizza, which is considered a vegetable for use in school lunches in the US.

Some culinary vegetables (like laver) are not even members of the plant kingdom, although mushrooms and other fungi are kept off the list for this reason.

Varieties of the color green may differ in hue, chroma (also called saturation or intensity) or lightness (or value, tone, or brightness), or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a green or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors is shown below.

In culinary terms, a vegetable is an edible plant or its part, intended for cooking or eating raw. In biological terms, "vegetable" designates members of the plant kingdom.

The non-biological definition of a vegetable is largely based on culinary and cultural tradition. Apart from vegetables, other main types of plant food are fruits, grains and nuts. Vegetables are most often consumed as salads or cooked in savory or salty dishes, while culinary fruits are usually sweet and used for desserts, but it is not the universal rule. Therefore, the division is somewhat arbitrary, based on cultural views. For example, some people consider mushrooms to be vegetables even though they are not biologically plants, while others consider them a separate food category; some cultures group potatoes with cereal products such as noodles or rice, while most English speakers would consider them vegetables.

Some vegetables can be consumed raw, some may be eaten cooked, and some must be cooked to destroy certain natural toxins or microbes in order to be edible, such as eggplant, unripe tomatoes, potatoes, daylily, winter melon, fiddlehead fern, and most kinds of legume/beans (such as common beans). A number of processed food items available on the market contain vegetable ingredients and can be referred to as "vegetable derived" products. These products may or may not maintain the nutritional integrity of the vegetable used to produce them.

A herbaceous plant (in American botanical use simply herb) is a plant that has leaves and stems that die down at the end of the growing season to the soil level. They have no persistent woody stem above ground. Herbaceous plants may be annuals, biennials or perennials.

Annual herbaceous plants die completely at the end of the growing season or when they have flowered and fruited, and they then grow again from seed.

Herbaceous perennial and biennial plants have stems that die at the end of the growing season, but parts of the plant survive under or close to the ground from season to season (for biennials, until the next growing season, when they flower and die). New growth develops from living tissues remaining on or under the ground, including roots, a caudex (a thickened portion of the stem at ground level) or various types of underground stems, such as bulbs, corms, stolons, rhizomes and tubers. Examples of herbaceous biennials include carrot, parsnip and common ragwort; herbaceous perennials include potato, peony, hosta, mint, most ferns and most grasses. By contrast, non-herbaceous perennial plants are woody plants which have stems above ground that remain alive during the dormant season and grow shoots the next year from the above-ground parts – these include trees, shrubs and vines.

A cultivar is a plant or grouping of plants selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation. Most cultivars have arisen in cultivation but a few are special selections from the wild. Popular ornamental garden plants like roses, camellias, daffodils, rhododendrons, and azaleas are cultivars produced by careful breeding and selection for flower colour and form. Similarly, the world's agricultural food crops are almost exclusively cultivars that have been selected for characteristics such as improved yield, flavour, and resistance to disease: very few wild plants are now used as food sources. Trees used in forestry are also special selections grown for their enhanced quality and yield of timber.

Cultivars form a major part of Liberty Hyde Bailey's broader grouping, the cultigen, defined as a plant whose origin or selection is primarily due to intentional human activity. Cultivar was coined by Liberty Hyde Bailey and it is generally regarded as a portmanteau of "cultivated" and "variety", but could also be derived from "cultigen" and "variety". A cultivar is not the same as a botanical variety, and there are differences in the rules for the formation and use of the names of botanical varieties and cultivars. In recent times the naming of cultivars has been complicated by the use of statutory Plant Patents and Plant Breeders' Rights names.

Tropical horticulture is a branch of horticulture that studies and cultivates plants in the tropics, i.e., the equatorial regions of the world. "TropHort" is an abbreviation for Tropical Horticulture.

Tropical Horticulture covers plants such as perennial woody plants (arboriculture), ornamentals (floriculture), vegetables (olericulture), and fruits (pomology) including grapes (viticulture). The origin of many of these crops is not in the tropics but in temperate zones. Their adoption to tropical climatic conditions is an objective of breeding. Many important crops, however, are indigenous to the tropics. The latter embrace perennial crops such as oil palm, vegetables including okra, field crops such as rice and sugarcane, and particularly fruits including pineapple, banana, papaya, and mango.

Since the tropics represent 36% of the Earth's surface and 20% of its land surface, the potential of tropical horticulture is tremendous. In contrast to temperate regions, environmental conditions in the tropics are defined less by seasonal temperature fluctuations and more by seasonality of precipitation. Thus the climate in the greater part of the tropics is characterized by distinct wet and dry seasons, although such variation is less in locations close to the equator (±5° latitude). Temperature conditions within the tropics are affected by altitude, in which contrasting warmer and colder climate areas in the tropics can be differentiated, and highland areas in the tropics can consequently be more favourable for production of temperate plant species than lowland areas are.

Vascular plants (from Latin vasculum: duct), also known as tracheophytes (from the equivalent Greek term trachea) and also higher plants, form a large group of plants that are defined as those land plants that have lignified tissues (the xylem) for conducting water and minerals throughout the plant. They also have (non-lignified) tissue to conduct products of photosynthesis. Vascular plants include the clubmosses, horsetails, ferns, gymnosperms (including conifers) and angiosperms (flowering plants). Scientific names for the group include Tracheophyta and Tracheobionta.

This is a list of plants that have been domesticated by humans.

The list includes species or larger formal and informal botanical categories that include at least some domesticated individuals.

To be considered domesticated, a population of plants must have their behavior, life cycle, or appearance significantly altered as a result of being under humans control for multiple generations. (Please see the main article on domestication for more information.)

Plants in this list are organized by the original or primary purpose for which they were domesticated. When a plant has more than one significant human use, it has been listed in more than one category.

Abelmoschus is a genus of about fifteen species of flowering plants in the mallow family, Malvaceae, native to tropical Africa, Asia and northern Australia. It was formerly included within Hibiscus, but is now classified as a distinct genus.

The genus comprises annual and perennial herbaceous plants, growing to 2 m tall. The leaves are 10–40 cm long and broad, palmately lobed with 3-7 lobes, the lobes are very variable in depth, from barely lobed, to cut almost to the base of the leaf. The flowers are 4–8 cm diameter, with five white to yellow petals, often with a red or purple spot at the base of each petal. The fruit is a capsule, 5–20 cm long, containing numerous seeds.

Abelmoschus species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Chionodes hibiscella which has been recorded on A. moschatus.

This is a partial list of garden plants, plants that can be cultivated in the garden, listed alphabetically by genus. See also list of plants by common name.

This page contains a list of useful plants, meaning a plant that has been or can be co-opted by humans to fulfill a particular need. Rather than listing all plants on one page, this page instead collects the lists and categories for the different ways in which a plant can be used; some plants may fall into several of the categories or lists below, and some lists overlap (for example, the term "crop" covers both edible and non-edible agricultural products).

The native flora of the United States includes about 17,000 species of vascular plants, plus tens of thousands of additional species of other plants and plant-like organisms such as algae, lichens and other fungi, and mosses. About 3,800 additional non-native species of vascular plants are recorded as established outside of cultivation in the U.S., as well as a much smaller number of non-native non-vascular plants and plant relatives. The United States possesses one of the most diverse temperate floras in the world, comparable only to that of China.^{[citation needed]}

Several biogeographic factors contribute to the richness and diversity of the U.S. flora. While most of the United States has a temperate climate, Alaska has vast arctic areas, the southernmost part of Florida is subtropical to tropical, Hawaii is fully tropical (including high mountains), and alpine summits are present on many western mountains, as well as a few in the Northeast. The U.S. coastline borders three oceans: The Atlantic (and Gulf of Mexico), the Arctic, and the Pacific. Finally, the U.S. shares long borders with Canada and Mexico, and is relatively close to the Bahamas, Cuba and other Caribbean islands, and easternmost Asia.

Seasonality of food refers to the times of year when a given type food is at its peak, either in terms of harvest or its flavour. This is usually the time when the item is the cheapest and the freshest on the market. The food's peak time in terms of harvest usually coincides with when its flavour is at its best. There are some exceptions; an example being sweet potatoes which are best eaten quite a while after harvest.

This page serves as a guide to the seasonality of food. The list below is for foods common in the Northern Hemisphere.

There has been considerable controversy about how far people should be encouraged to eat seasonal food. In 2008, the chef Gordon Ramsay attracted media coverage when he stated that restaurants should be fined for serving non-seasonal food. In September and October 2008, Valentine Warner presented a programme for BBC Two, entitled What to Eat Now, persuading people to consume seasonal food.