Plants and Fungi

Introductory paragraph.

Redkeep Flora

Crops and Household Plants

Thanks to its climate, Redkeep is host to a wide, rich variety of plant and fungal life. Many of these species are yet undescribed, but most trees and domesticated plants are well documented. First, trees and woody shrubs and vines will be covered.

Pe - "Redkeep Pear"
A fruit tree.

Utottse
A large flowering tree whose resin can be purified into latex. While no part of it is strictly edible, its flowers' petals are sometimes included in tea mixes for dubious medicinal benefit.

Xete
A flowering shrub. Its flowers are often made into a water-resistant paper, used as fabric. It has green berries - edible but small, bland, and hard to see — as it was not bred for its fruit, the fruit remained mostly unchanged, though on average it is larger in domesticated strains.

Tse
A nut-bearing tree, with slightly bitter, spicy nuts. The feral version of Itse ("little tse"), a cross between itse and the original wild-type tse tree. This feral tse was so prolific that the original wild-type tse no longer exists. There are breeding programs working to restore the original flavor profile and color varieties.

Itse
A nut-bearing shrub. The domesticated version of Tse. It grows more, smaller seeds than tse, and has a sweeter, fattier taste.

Oshere
A woody vine (grows olive-like fruit). A fleshy, oily fruit with a low sugar content and thick skin. Strong chemical taste, slightly bitter.

Gontte
A melon vine. All of the plant is edible, but only the leaves and fruit are commonly eaten (the stem in particular is far too tough to make good food). The leaves are large, thin, and spiny, and must be boiled or rubbed to remove the spikes. They taste acidic. The fruit has a thick rind, low seed content, and dense, watery flesh. Like the rest of the plant, the fruit has a leafy, slightly acidic flavor.

Pexle
An aerial vine that parasitizes trees. Its sap is a precursor to latex, though because of its size, it is typicaly used as an additive in other latex manufacture methods.

Many English-named plants exist in RK as well. Their RK names are broadly borrowed from English:
rice - rese
glowberry - klobere
flax - fle
grape - kre
sugarcane - suke
chickpeas - ttsikepe
cacao - keko
coffee - kofe
pepper - pepe
tomato - tomete
eggplant/aubergine - ekepente

Lekite
The walking shrub. Very intelligent. Very cute. Tastes of blood, mildly poisonous. Its flowers can be processed into plastic strands. These can be melted into sheets or woven. Both are often used for fabric.

Kotts-Hos Flora

Kotts-Hos has a much cooler, drier climate, with far fewer and larger trees, and, overall, smaller and shorter-lived small plants. There are still a wide variety of shrubs, many of which bear (small, acrid) fruit. Far fewer crops exist, and more plants are primarily left for forage (though both small-scale farming and intentional planting/forest gardening both exist).