One plant, six vegetables
Collard, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprout, kohlrabi. Six vegetables, six shapes, six flavours, six places in the supermarket — and, in the USDA’s own plant database, one species with one name.
The USDA keeps a database of plant names called GRIN, and its page for the collard is a small shock. The collard is filed as “Brassica oleracea L. var. viridis L.” with a comment underneath: “or Brassica oleracea Collard Group.” Below that, the page has a heading you should read slowly — “Other conspecific taxa.” Conspecific means of the same species. So everything in that list is the same plant, botanically speaking, as a collard. And here is what is in it, each one carrying the same two-word species name and its own comment: var. capitata, “or Brassica oleracea Red Cabbage and White/Green Cabbage Groups”; var. botrytis, “or Brassica oleracea Cauliflower Group”; var. italica, “or Brassica oleracea Broccoli Group”; var. gemmifera, “or Brassica oleracea Brussels Sprouts Group”; var. gongylodes, “or Brassica oleracea Kohlrabi Group.” Six vegetables that do not look, taste, cook or even sit in the same part of a shop, and one species name stretched over all of them.
Basis: USDA Agricultural Research Service, GRIN-Global Taxonomy, taxon record 7679 (Brassica oleracea L. var. viridis L.) and the records it links as conspecific taxa: 7672, 7671, 105447, 7675, 7676. The quoted group names are GRIN’s own “Comment” lines, unchanged. GRIN lists further conspecific varieties besides these six; only the ones whose group names name a familiar vegetable are quoted here.
So which of the six is the collard, exactly? The USDA committee that looks after these crops is not certain, and says so in its own section heading: “Collard – B. oleracea, Acephala? Sabellica? or Capitata Group?” Three groups, three question marks. Its status report says why that is hard to settle: “Collard is a cole crop that is deemed uniquely American. It was likely brought to North America by British colonials and subsequently flourished in the southeastern U.S., but specifics of its beginnings are not readily available.” Then it gives its own best guess, and it is a lovely thing to think about: “Although collard is often classified in the Acephala Group with kale, it is more likely that collard was selected as a nonheading cabbage out of traditional heading cabbage types that have been cultivated in the Southeast since colonial times.” A cabbage chosen for not making a cabbage. Notice the words the report uses — likely, more likely, not readily available. This is scientists being careful in public, and it is worth copying.
Basis: USDA Crucifer Crop Germplasm Committee, “Vegetable Crucifers – Status Report,” revised 22 September 2004 (committee chair and principal author Dr. Mark W. Farnham, USDA-ARS), section on collard. Quotations unchanged, including the question marks in the heading. The report states this as its own judgement, not as a settled fact, and this note keeps it that way.
Whatever the history, the plant on the shelf behaves like loose leaves rather than a ball, and that changes how it is picked. Clemson University’s extension service, writing for South Carolina gardeners, gives two ways: “Entire plants may be cut when half-grown or full-grown,” or — the interesting one — “To extend the harvest, break off individual leaves starting from the bottom of the plant and move up over time. Pick only a few leaves from each plant to give the plant time to recover.” You cannot do that with a cauliflower. Cut a cauliflower and it is over. The other thing about this plant is that cold does not stop it: “Mature plants will withstand frosts and light to medium freezes,” Clemson notes, and “Collards (Brassica oleracea) can be grown most of the year in South Carolina.” USDA’s research magazine describes the calendar that follows — the plants “are planted in August, and foot-long leaves are harvested from November to the end of February” — and paints the picture: “Around New Year’s Day, there’s not much green on the coastal plains of North or South Carolina, except for neat rows of collards.” A vegetable you go outside and pick in January.
Basis: Clemson Cooperative Extension, Home & Garden Information Center factsheet HGIC 1307, “Collards” (updated 23 January 2023), sections Planting and Harvesting & Storage; USDA Agricultural Research Service, AgResearch Magazine, “A Collection of Carolina Collards” (April 2008). Quotations unchanged.
Here is the question this note cannot answer. Six vegetables came out of one plant, and every state in the country can buy all six. So why is it the collard — and not the cabbage or the broccoli — that one state wrote into its law books, and why is that same state the one at the top of the USDA table in the quiz? It is easy to line up an explanation. USDA’s magazine says the crop “has always been a local staple in the South.” The plant is at its best in exactly the months when a Southern garden has almost nothing else in it. A vegetable you can pick leaf by leaf all winter is a genuinely useful thing to have, in a way a once-and-done cauliflower is not. Each of those is true on its own. None of them is a measurement, and none of the sources used here says which of them — if any — put South Carolina at the top of a 2022 acreage table. Notice too that the order of events runs the wrong way for a simple story: the law naming the state vegetable was passed in 2011, and people had been growing and eating these greens there for very much longer than that. A law is more likely to be a record of what people already do than a reason they do it.
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
📊 Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.