Tobacco is a mythical plant from the Solanaceae family.

For thousands of years it has been closely related to humans not only as a vegetable of many uses, but more as a companion to our day by day activities.  The bond with tobacco is almost inexplicable.  It is a strange attraction that causes a need to experiment with it. Leading to a pleasant stimulation and a further dependability of its virtues.

To understand tobacco, one must love tobacco.

This plant is an unpredictable product, it depends on nature’s mercy and every year it always turns out differently than the previous. The influential elements like the soil and the weather can vary making it’s cultivation a puzzle.  Even the tobacco seeds can degenerate through years of planting.  The research on the origins of tobacco will lead us to understand that tobacco is an accident of nature that occurred by chance in the far lands of what now is called Peru.  Nothing is 100% certain in tobacco and you can always expect a challenge if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to grow it.

The miracle of Nicotiana Tabacum, or tobacco as we know it, is nothing short than a gift from God.

It is a hybrid plant that shouldn’t have happened, but did. Two varieties of the Nicotiana genus (not from the same species) crossed, creatinga hybrid, which by definition shouldn’t deliver a hermaphrodite plant with the ability to reproduce itself. It should not produce pollen in the tobacco flower to self fecundate it’s pistils, but somehow it did. To visualize this we can use the example of a male horse and a female donkey.  Their offspring is called a mule.  The mule can not reproduce itself because their parents come from different species (even though they are from the same genus and family).

In the pictures here we can see the Nicotiana Rustica plant, from the same Solanaceae family and from the same  Nicotiana Genus but a different species,  Rustica not Tabacum. The tobacco geneticist, in order to obtain male sterility in his tobacco will cross Nicotiana Tabacum with Nicotina Rustica and the resulting tobacco plants will not produce seeds  this works as insurance. So people in the industry from a different company will not have the chance to take them and grow tobacco – taking advantage of many years of research and effort from a geneticist.  This would also create a big diversity in the plants that come out of this first crossing or F1 as it is called.  Seven generations (F7) are needed of back crossing with the original tobacco father and the newer offspring tobacco plants to assure the original characteristics and virtues of the father plant. This is accomplished by always selecting the plant to reproduce according to the male plant that supplies the pollen. The offspring that come from the crossing of two different Nicotiana species will never produce pollen, they will always be male sterile.

by Hendreik Kelner Jr.