African names for American plants

African slaves brought plant knowledge to the New World, sometimes applying it to related plants they found there and sometimes bringing Old World plants with them. By tracing the linguistic parallels between names for plants in African languages and in communities descended from African slaves, pieces of the African slaves’ plant knowledge remain embedded in New World cultures. Ethnobotanist Tinde van Andel describes how such work has spawned new collaborations between botanists and linguists