However, interest in flax seed as an herbal medicinal has been on the rise. North Dakota is the United States center for production of the plant, which is mostly used to extract the oil. The overall process was long, tedious and yielded fabric of questionable quality and definite roughness. The whole process was a real pain in the “you know what.” Stems were removed and the fibers combed 3 times before the fibers were spun in to thread.

The fibers were pulled with a broad comb and could take several weeks to finish. Add to the inferior quality was the plant’s harvesting difficulties.įlax was harvested by hand pulling and then spread out to dry.

In a way, it was since the fiber grows 20% stronger when it is wet but most wearers didn’t go around with wet clothes and the overall quality of the fabric was poor. The American settlers were sick and tired of paying for British goods and the attendant taxes, and flax was thought to be a cheap fabric substitute. But its real use was as a fiber for cheap cloth. Interestingly, the plants are fire resistant due to leaves that stay wet and green during the fire season.įlax is a useful forage for livestock and wildlife in early spring and birds enjoy the seed capsules. The lovely flowers hang in racemes and become small capsules, whose seeds are mucilaginous when they become wet. You can recognize plants that are not in flower by their narrow, alternate leaves that attach without petioles. The blue form is also called woody flax and may be a nuisance weed in the western states. The plant prefers sub-tropical to temperate regions where there is a long flax plant history of its practical use. The crop was brought to North America as a forage, pharmaceutical, fiber and for its oil, among other flax plant uses. It is quite a pretty little plant with showy periwinkle blue-petaled flowers, which may also occur in white, red or yellow. The flax seed plant is an annual to semi-hardy, short lived, evergreen herbaceous plant that may reach up to 47 inches tall. Today, you can find it commercially in Minnesota and the Dakotas but larger productions exist in China, Egypt, Belgium, Russia and France. Flax is widespread, both as a crop and as a wild introduced plant in North America, but it is really from the Mediterranean. There is evidence that it was used by Neolithic Swiss Lake dwellers and later, in as early as 3,000 BC, it was a common plant to make twine, nets and cloth.

Flax Plant HistoryĬommon flax ( Linum usitatissimum) may have been one of the earliest plants domesticated and cultivated. Up until the early 1800s, it was commercially widespread but about the time of the invention of the cotton gin, production declined drastically. Most fascinating is flax’s boom and bust period in the United States. Yet, its early origins as a commercial crop are from 1793, and the plant was cultivated during the ancient Egyptian times when its fibers were made into cloth in which to wrap mummies. It has been used as a drying agent for paint, varnish, lacquer and ink. Most of us are familiar with a common product of flax – linseed oil.

Silverstack flax plant