A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
chicory
Chicory is a stiff wiry roadside perennial with almost no visible leaf on the stem and startling sky-blue flowers that open at dawn and close by midday. It grows on waste ground, verges, and rubble across Europe and North America. The taproot, roasted and ground, gives the bitter dark additive that has been mixed with coffee or substituted for it for three centuries, and it is why New Orleans coffee tastes the way it does.
Etymology
The word reached English through French and Latin from Greek, and the Greeks appear to have borrowed it from Egyptian, since the plant was being grown in Egypt long before it got to Greece. Its Latin species name is the ancestor of endive, so chicory and endive are the same plant name arriving in English by two different roads. Belgian endive, Italian radicchio, and the roasting root are all one species under cultivation.
Notes
The flowers track the sun and close on a schedule reliable enough that Linnaeus included chicory in his proposed floral clock, a garden planted so that you could read the hour off which species had opened. The blue fades to nearly white within hours of picking.