ABSTRACT
Chinese artichoke is a mint-like perennial herb, which grows wild in Northern China and Japan. The plant is 30 to 50 cm (12-18 in.) tall, with hairy (felt-like), crinkly leaves and small white or pink §owers produced in the summer. By late fall, on the ends of underground stalks up to 30 cm (1 ft.) long, there develop numerous, small, slender, edible tubers, somewhat resembling a closely threaded string of large whitish beads, just under the soil surface. These highly distinctive tubers
are 2.5 to 5.5 cm (1-2 in.) or more in length and 1.3 to 2.5 cm (1/2-1 in.) in thickness, with up to a dozen bulging segments (the “beads”). The §esh is white and crisp. Chinese artichoke was used as a vegetable in China at least by the fourteenth century and was cultivated there by the seventeenth century. The species was rst brought to Europe in 1882, having been sent to France from China. Chinese artichokes were popular in Europe from about 1890 to 1920, but subsequently became obscure, and only in recent times has the vegetable begun to be noticed again. It is grown commercially primarily in China, Japan, France, and Belgium and may be found occasionally in home gardens or as offerings of specialty produce growers in North America (tubers and sometimes seeds are available from mail-order garden catalogues). Chinese artichoke is a rare vegetable everywhere, including China, but is expensive and considered to be a gourmet treat. Some varieties are propagated vegetatively by tubers, not by seeds, and several of these are incapable of producing seeds. For those contemplating cultivating the plant, it has been said that it is virtually impossible to nd all the tubers produced, so there are always some left behind to grow the following season (whether one likes it or not). As well as being cultivated as a garden plant, Chinese artichoke is grown as a ground cover.
