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Malvaceae
Cotton Flower
Gossypium hirsutum
Fragility transformed, cycles, useful beauty.
- Family
- Malvaceae
- Genus
- Gossypium
- Native to
- Mexico, Central America
- Bloom season
- Summer
- Type
- Annual or perennial shrub
- Height
- 1–1.5 m (3–5 ft)
- Sunlight
- Full sun
- Soil
- Rich, well-drained
- Water
- Moderate
- Hardiness
- 8–11
- Lifespan
- Annual in cultivation
Did you know
- Cotton flowers open in the morning a soft creamy-white, turn pink by afternoon, and deepen to red the next morning before falling off—a one-day color show that has captivated farmers for millennia.
- After the flower falls, the seed pod (boll) develops, eventually splitting open to reveal the famous fluffy white fibers—each boll contains the wool from 10,000 individual seeds.
- Cotton is one of the few crops where you eat the seed and wear the fiber—cottonseed oil is in countless processed foods, while the lint becomes nearly half the world's clothing.
- Cultivated by Mesoamericans for at least 7,000 years, cotton was independently domesticated in both the Old and New Worlds—Egyptian and Indian cotton are different species from American.
- The brilliant 'red cotton' of Mexico's Oaxaca region is still hand-spun and woven by Zapotec weavers from heirloom plants whose flowers have a slight pink tint—a rare cultural and botanical heirloom.
Color meanings
0
fragility transformed
1
cycles
2
useful beauty