Cotton: The Fabric of Our Lives :: Botany

cotton The Fabric of Our LivesOils, balls, swabs, bandages, tissue, paper, napkins, diapers, socks, underwear, shirts, terses, sweaters, pants, coats, towels, linen, cushions, drapery, upholstery, rugs, carpet, comforters, mattresses, insulation, filtration, and many other things that are used daily by everyone are peaceful of, or inspi blushing(a) by cotton. Cotton is a soft, fluffy, ingrainedly occurring fictitious character plant that can be processed into an array of materials and goods. Many, many things that we wear, relaxation on, sleep under, walk on, or utilize in wound-care, etc., contain some percentage of cotton. It is a fiber that is used everyday, by everyone, in one way or another. It has qualities that have made it a choice crop for centuries around the world. Today though, cotton is being largely displaced by synthetic fibers that have qualities that exceed the natural crop plant. These fibers can also be mass-produced and sold at relatively lower costs. Still, cotton stands alone as the most utilized fiber crop plant used around the world. Also known as King Cotton, in the United States, it was the major force behind the institution of the American age of slavery, and cotton prevailed as the economic source for the southern states of the United States and its antebellum prosperity before the civil war. It holds an important place in Americas past, present, and future. Cotton is truly the Fabric of Our Lives. Characteristics Cotton is an annual, biennial or perennial plant, but in cultivation it is generally treated as an annual herbaceous to short shrub or small tree - two to six feet tall. It consist of a primary axis, erect and branched with a vegetative lower regularise having monopodial branches, and a fruiting upper zone with sympodial branches. The leaves of the cotton plant alternate, cordate petiolate, three to nine lobed and palmately veined, with varying size, texture, shape and hairiness. The large, showy, cream yellow, red o r purple flowers are extra axillary, terminal, solitary, and borne on sympodial branches. The calyx (= collectively the sepals) consists of a very short cup-shaped structure at the base of the corolla. The five petals of the corolla are any free or slightly united at the base of the convoluted bud (Sundararaj, 1974). Cotton belongs to Gossypium, a genus named by Linnaeus in the middle of the 18th century. The genus has been separate in both the Malvaceae or mallow family and the Bombacaceae families and in both the Hibsceae and Gossypieae tribes.