Coontie

Description:

Rare in the wild, it remains on the Florida Commercially Exploited Plant list making it illegal to collect wild specimens.The Coontie is a cycad.the most ancient of all plants, they are often called living fossils.

Habitat:

Zamia inhabits a variety of habitats with well drained sands or sandy loam soils throughout peninsular Florida.

Notes:

When the Seminoles moved into Florida in the mid-18th century, they picked up on this very important food source. In fact, "Coontie" is one of the names the Seminoles had for this plant and it roughly means "flour root". The Indians would cut up pieces of the stems and pound them out into a powder . They would then wash this in water several times and then let the starch sink to the bottom. The paste was taken and fermented, and then dried to a powder. When the white men came to Florida they also used the stems for food. .For this reason the coontie was often commonly called Seminole bread during the late 1800s. Around 1845, several factories sprung up all over south Florida to produce starch from the Coontie. One of the mills along the Miami River is said to have processed 10-15 tons of product per day at peak production. In south Florida, a natural population would grow very slow. It can take 30 years to grow a plant that might weigh five pounds. These factories produced starch until 1925.