Vegetation in the early 15th century?

First of all, can’t promote this post enough! While many of us in the community are very well informed, most of us are still amateur medievalists, historians, and archaeologists. You guys at Warhorse should really contact those guys at the Czech Archaeobotanical Institute! As a community member, I would much rather you listen to them than me! :stuck_out_tongue:

Seondly, some blatant self-promotion! Landscape of Medieval Bohemia My old post about the landscape of medieval Bohemia also included lots of good posts by other community members about the vegetation of the time (especially tree species cover).

Thirdly, interesting factoid of the day: Carrots come in a variety of different colours. The modern orange carrot we are all used to though, was in fact popularized by Dutch horticulturalists in the 17th century for patriotic reasons (EDIT: Turns out this last statement is likely a myth. It is true that orange only became really popular during that time period though). Before then, carrots grown in Europe were generally either white, yellow or purple, and sometimes even red. (EDIT: Inserted sentence) There is evidence for orange carrots in paintings in manuscripts - one of the problems is there was no word for the colour orange until the 16th century, so some carrots called red or yellow in older manuscripts might have been orange to us. So the orange only carrots in some of the KCD screenshots are actually kind of anachronistic! More info on carrots here.

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'm not sure if it already has been written …
Was recently on various castles and there was an exhibition of products made from flax. Apparently flax was the “plastic” of the Middle Ages, thus likely wide acreage of this raw material have been present.

About flax:
http://vk.com/video763539_162138873
The complete technological process of making quality trousers with huge pockets made of flax.

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