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Gossypium hirsutum
Also called Cotton, American Cotton, American Upland Cotton, Bourbon Cotton, Creole Cotton
Upland cotton is a shrubby, warm-season plant grown as an annual crop for its fibre and seed. It needs a long, hot, frost-free season and full sun to produce its bolls.
Gossypium hirsutum, also known as upland cotton or Mexican cotton, is the most widely planted species of cotton in the world. Globally, about 90% of all cotton production is of cultivars derived from this species. In the United States, the world's largest exporter of cotton, it constitutes approximately 95% of all cotton production. It is native from Mexico to Ecuador and northeast Brazil, the Leeward Antilles in the Caribbean and the Pacific (Fiji, Marianas, Polynesia and Revillagigedo Islands).
It is believed that Gossypium hirsutum was created when a wild Mexican cotton species mixed with the wild African species Gossypium herbaceum around 5–10 million years ago, producing a hybrid species with four pairs of chromosomes (totaling 52 chromosomes) via polyploidy.
African Wild Cotton · Tree cotton · Creole cotton · Levant cotton · Hawai'ian cotton · Cotton
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Gossypium hirsutum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
