Cotton

Gossypium barbadense is one of the cotton species, a member of the mallow family whose native range runs from Colombia to Peru. On the coast of present-day Ecuador and Peru it was in wide use some five thousand years ago, and the people there may have been its first domesticators. In the dry tropics it is a frost-tender perennial that becomes a bush or small tree of one to three metres, though farmers grow it as an annual. Its leaves are cut into three to five deep lobes, its showy yellow flowers open only partly, and its black seeds form in bolls that split open when ripe to show snowball-like tufts of fibre. It is prized for an unusually long, fine and silky fibre, sold under names such as Sea Island, Egyptian and Pima cotton; it makes up about a twentieth of the world's crop and goes into fine yarn, lace, high thread-count cloth and sewing thread. Like all cottons it contains gossypol, which makes the plant poisonous to animals that are not ruminants. The folk magic Cunningham records is mostly about the fibre: a piece put in the sugar bowl, or thrown over the right shoulder at dawn, brings luck before the day is out; cotton planted or strewn in the yard keeps ghosts away; vinegar-soaked cotton balls on the windowsills hold evil off; pepper sewn into cotton and worn calls back a lost love; and burning it is said to bring rain.