Sweetcorn
Sweetcorn
Food Plant
A giant grass grown for its sweet kernels — where each silky thread on a cob must catch wind-blown pollen to make a single grain.
💡 Fun Facts
- Sweetcorn is really a giant grass — a cousin of the lawn and of wheat.
- Each silky thread hanging from a cob leads to a single kernel, which only forms if that thread catches pollen.
- The pollen falls from feathery tassels at the very top of the plant and drifts down on the wind.
📅 Through the Year
- Flowering:July to August
- Fruiting:August to October
Name Story
Zea mays
means “the grain called maize”
What does its name mean?
- Zea — a grainGreek zea — an ancient name for an Old-World cereal
- mays — maizeTaíno (Caribbean) mahiz, the plant’s native name
This name stitches two worlds together. The first word is an ancient Greek name for a grain the Greeks knew well — but they never saw maize, which comes from the Americas. The second word is the plant’s true native name, mahiz, given by the Taíno people of the Caribbean, which became our word ‘maize’.