ABSTRACT
This chapter provides information on uses, folk medicine, chemistry, germplasm, distribution, ecology, cultivation, harvesting, yields, energy, and biotic factors of Groundnut. An attractively flowered plant, suggestive of Wisteria, Apios has been described by the NAS231 as a "useful, sweet-scented ornamental". During the potato famine of 1845, Apios was introduced to Europe (but not for the first time). Its cultivation there as a food crop was abandoned when potato growing again became feasible. According to Hartwell, the tubers were used in folk remedies for that cancerous condition known as "Proud Flesh" in New England. Nuts were boiled and made into a plaster: "For to eat out the proud flesh they (Indians) take a kind of earth nut boyled and stamped." Apios produces a complex pterocarpan that appears structurally similar to glyceollin III, a phytoalexin of the cultivated soybean.
