Plantae > Tracheophyta > Magnoliopsida > Asterales > Asteraceae > Cichorium > Cichorium intybus

Cichorium intybus (chicory)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

Common chicory, Cichorium intybus, is a somewhat woody, perennial herbaceous plant of the dandelion family, usually with bright blue flowers, rarely white or pink. Many varieties are cultivated for salad leaves, chicons (blanched buds), or roots (var. sativum), which are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute and additive. It is also grown as a forage crop for livestock. It lives as a wild plant on roadsides in its native Europe, and is now common in North America, China, and Australia, where it has become widely naturalized.
View Wikipedia Record: Cichorium intybus

Infraspecies

Cichorium intybus f. album
Cichorium intybus intybus
Cichorium intybus spicatum
Cichorium intybus var. foliosum
Cichorium intybus var. sativum

Attributes

Bee Flower Color [1]  Blue
Flower Color [2]  Blue
Foliage Color [2]  Green
Fruit Color [2]  Brown
Bloom Period [2]  Mid Summer
Drought Tolerance [2]  Medium
Edible [3]  May be edible. See the Plants For A Future link below for details.
Fire Tolerance [2]  Medium
Flower Type [3]  Hermaphrodite
Frost Free Days [2]  90 days
Fruit/Seed Abundance [2]  Medium
Fruit/Seed Begin [2]  Summer
Fruit/Seed End [2]  Fall
Growth Form [2]  Bunch
Growth Period [2]  Summer
Growth Rate [2]  Rapid
Hazards [3]  Excessive and continued use may impair function of the retina;
Leaf Type [2]  Deciduous
Lifespan [3]  Perennial
Pollinators [3]  Bees, Bats
Propagation [2]  Seed
Regrowth Rate [2]  Slow
Root Depth [2]  8 inches (20 cm)
Seed Spread Rate [2]  Rapid
Seed Vigor [2]  High
Seeds Per [2]  426399 / lb (940050 / kg)
Shape/Orientation [2]  Erect
Structure [5]  Herb
Usage [3]  The roots have the potential to be used for the production of biomass for industrial use; They are rich in the starch 'inulin' which can easily be converted to alcohol; A blue dye has been obtained from the leaves; The flowers are an alternative ingredient of 'QR' herbal compost activator; This is a dried and powdered mixture of several herbs that can be added to a compost heap in order to speed up bacterial activity and thus shorten the time needed to make the compost;
Vegetative Spread Rate [2]  None
Flower Conspicuous [2]  Yes
Height [3]  4.92 feet (1.5 m)
Width [3]  20 inches (0.5 m)
Hardiness Zone Minimum [2]  USDA Zone: 2 Low Temperature: -50 F° (-45.6 C°) → -40 F° (-40 C°)
Light Preference [4]  Mostly Sunny
Soil Acidity [4]  Neutral
Soil Fertility [4]  Intermediate
Soil Moisture [4]  Mostly Dry
Water Use [2]  High
Screening - Summer [2]  Porous
Screening - Winter [2]  Porous
View Plants For A Future Record : Cichorium intybus

Protected Areas

Ecosystems

Predators

Consumers

External References

USDA Plant Profile

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Arnold SEJ, Faruq S, Savolainen V, McOwan PW, Chittka L, 2010 FReD: The Floral Reflectance Database — A Web Portal for Analyses of Flower Colour. PLoS ONE 5(12): e14287.
♦ 2USDA Plants Database, U. S. Department of Agriculture
♦ 3Plants For A Future licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
♦ 4ECOFACT 2a Technical Annex - Ellenberg’s indicator values for British Plants, M O Hill, J O Mountford, D B Roy & R G H Bunce (1999)
♦ 5Kattge, J. et al. (2011b) TRY - a global database of plant traits Global Change Biology 17:2905-2935
♦ 6Study of Northern Virginia Ecology
♦ 7Biological Records Centre Database of Insects and their Food Plants
♦ 8Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 9Ben-Dov, Y., Miller, D.R. & Gibson, G.A.P. ScaleNet 4 November 2009
♦ 10Species Interactions of Australia Database, Atlas of Living Australia, Version ala-csv-2012-11-19
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0