Spices and Condiments (1+1)

Description of the plant

• Turmeric is an erect perennial herb, but is grown as an annual. The primary tuber at the base of the aerial stem is ellipsoidal, bearing many rhizomes, straight or a little curved, with secondary branches in two rows, which may have tertiary branches, the whole forming a dense clump.
  
• The rhizomes have a distinctive taste and smell. They are brownish and scaly outside and bright orange in colour inside. The leafy shoots are erect, less than 1 m in height, bearing 6-10 leaves with the leaf sheaths forming a pseudostem.
  
• The thin petiole is rather abruptly broadened from the sheath. The lamina is lanceolate, acuminate and thin, dark green above and pale green beneath, with ellucid dots.
  
• The inflorescence is a cylindrical spike, terminal on the leaf shoot, with the scape partly enclosed by the leaf sheaths. The bracts are adnate for less than half their length and are elliptic, lanceolate and acute.
  
• The upper sterile bracts are white or white streaked with green, pink-tipped in some cultivars, fading to light-green bracts below. The flowers are borne in cincinni of two in the axils of the bracts, opening one at a time, and are thin-textured and fugacious.
  
• The calyx is short, unequally toothed and split nearly half-way down one side.
  
• The corolla is tubular at the base, being the upper half-cup-shaped with three unequal lobes inserted on the edge of the cup lip; it is whitish, thin and translucent with a hooded dorsal lobe.
  
• There are two lateral staminodes, elliptic-oblong, which are the hood of the dorsal petal.
  
• The filament of the stamen is short and broad, united to a versatile anther at about the middle of the parallel pollen sacs.
  
• The cylindrical stylodes are about 4 mm long. The ovary is inferior and trilocular with a slender style passing between the anther lobes and held by them. The fruits are few, if ever produced.