Beyond food and medicine, but necessary for life, too: other folk plant uses in several territories of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands

When coining the term ethnobotany, Harshberger [1] considered as basic points for the newly named science “elucidating the cultural position of tribes who used plants” (where, nowadays, ‘tribes’ is replaced by ‘human groups’, [2]), “clarifying the past distribution of plants”, “determining trade routes” and “suggesting new current production lines” for useful plants. For Portères and Barrau [3, 4], ethnobotany is a discipline located at the crossroad between natural and human sciences studying the behaviour of human societies with regard to plants. Other authors state that ethnobotanical research rescues and updates the history of plants in human societies through time and space [5].

Even if ethnobotany deals with all kinds of plant uses, at least in western European countries, ethnobotanical research focused on food and medicinal plants is by far the most dominant, what can be verified when surveying the articles that have appeared in relevant journals. Such a situation can be explained by two kinds of reasons. On the one hand, food and medicine are the two plant folk applications more directly linked to human health, so that they are maintained at a relatively high rate even in industrialised societies. Conversely, these countries have undergone a rather deep process of acculturation, in the sense of adopting so-called modern habits in detriment of traditional culture [6], which implied that rural communities abandoned a great deal of traditional practices linked to plants, because they are much less necessary (if necessary at all) nowadays than in the first half of 20^th century. On the other hand, the above-quoted food and medicinal properties are those which most likely can lead to the development of new commercial sources of welfare products (see e.g., [7]). Some non-food and non-medicinal popular uses are slightly better preserved than most of them, such as basketry [8] and cosmetics [9, 10], the latter being, in fact, very closely linked to medicinal ones. Some specific papers with ethnobotanical focus have been devoted to these other plant uses in European countries (e.g., those quoted for basketry and cosmetics, as well as [11‐16]). Additionally, some compilation work, rather addressed to folk knowledge vulgarisation, contain information on these plant utilisations; as an example the first volume of the ongoing Spanish Inventory of Traditional Knowledge related to Biodiversity [17] provides information on all kinds of plant uses, including those dealt with in the present paper. In any case, even taking into account the above-quoted contributions, this approach still remains quite scarce.

The research on ethnobotany in the Catalan linguistic domain has been intense in the last 25 years. This research mostly comprises data on food and medicinal (including veterinarian) plant uses, as well as studies linked to agroecosystems (mostly homegardens) and to ethnoecological questions (cf. [10, 18], and references therein). Only very rarely other plant uses have been addressed [19, 20], although, throughout our research, we have maintained the conviction that a robust pool of knowledge on these uses still exists. Taking this into account, the aims of the present paper are: 1) to provide an overview on non-food and non-medicinal popular plant uses in five Catalan language territories, three in Catalonia and two in the Balearic Islands; 2) to evaluate to what extent these uses are persisting and how are they currently considered by their practitioners.