About Zingiber barbatum

Ginger is native to Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, China, the Indian subcontinent, and New Guinea.It contains real ginger, a plant grown around the world for its culinary value.The most famous are Z.officinale and Z.mioga, two species of garden ginger.

Cooking

Each type of ginger has a different culinary use; myoga, for example, is valued for its stem and flower.The rhizome of garden ginger is the classic spice "ginger" and can be used whole, candied (often called crystallized ginger), or dried and powdered.Other popular gingers used in cooking include cardamom and turmeric, although none of these examples are "true ginger" they belong to a different genus of the Zingiberaceae family.

Zingiber barbatum

Ginger barbatum (meik-thalin or meik tha-lin) is a medicinal, therapeutic ginger found in Myanmar.The plant is a rhizomatous plant mainly concentrated in the Yangon, Bago and Mandalay regions, although specimens have also been found in at least two other administrative regions.Researchers at the University of Tsukuba, Bachajaran University and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Agricultural University believe that the plant is an "underutilized [sic] medicinal plant",being "used in indigenous medicine system".The botanists collated 19 specimens from five administrative regions of Myanmar and noted 29 morphological characteristics involving growth habit, leaf, pseudostem and rhizome characteristics.Of these 29, 22 showed high variability among wild ginger specimens and 20 "contributed significantly" to morphological variation. A total of 175 bands were generated by 11 amplification primer sets, showing 92.15% polymorphism in the intraspecific specimens.

In Nathaniel Wallich's 1830 compendium Plantae Asiaticae Rariores: or, Descriptions and figures of a selected number of unpublished East Indian plants, he provides a detailed description of Z.barbatum:This species is closest to William Roxburgh's Zingiber squarrosum, which I found abundantly in Rangoon, but differs in having more wider, raised and belly-shaped bracts terminating in a very long Cylindrical point.It grows on the hills near the banks of the Ayeyarwady River, about Prom, on the banks of that river, and I saw it bearing unripe fruit in September.The plants introduced from there to the Kolkata garden bloom freely during the cold and rainy season.Spikes arise from stolons near the stem or from the base of the stem, barely above the surface; they are sometimes compound, that is, a spikelet arises from one or two of the lowermost bracts.The whole plant has a very faint but pleasant aromatic smell and taste.