Cultivated Tobacco

Cultivated Tobacco is a tender annual raised from seed, either direct-sown or transplanted once the danger of frost has passed. It grows best in consistently moist, organically rich, well-drained soil in full sun to part shade, doing better with some afternoon shade where summers are hot, and it tolerates most soil textures as long as drainage is good. Because it cannot survive temperatures below the mid-20s Fahrenheit, it is treated as a fresh annual crop each season rather than carried over winter.

Cultivated Tobacco is not troubled by many serious insect pests or diseases, but it is susceptible to tobacco mosaic virus, which affects the foliage.

The leaves, which can grow up to 18 inches long, are the part harvested once mature, forming the raw material for commercial tobacco production.

Commercial: Cultivated Tobacco is grown worldwide as a cash crop, its leaves processed into commercial tobacco products; major present-day producers include China, the United States, India, and Brazil.

Ornamental: Some plants are grown as an annual ornamental for their large foliage and fragrant, night-opening tubular flowers, though such garden use has largely given way to other flowering tobacco species better suited to daytime display.

Cultural: Indigenous peoples of the Americas were the first recorded users of the plant, smoking or chewing its leaves for spiritual, hallucinogenic, and medicinal purposes long before it reached Europe.

Cultivated Tobacco is native to tropical America, with Bolivia recorded as its country of origin, and it was already cultivated and used by Indigenous peoples of the Americas before European contact. Spanish and English explorers carried the plant across the Atlantic during the sixteenth century: Cortés shipped leaf to Spain in 1519, Jean Nicot sent seeds to France around 1560, and Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the plant to England in 1586. Commercial growing followed quickly, beginning in the West Indies in 1535 and in Virginia soon after, from which tobacco spread into Europe, Africa, and Asia to become a widely traded crop.