Exotic Plant

Exotic Plant any of the plant species of foreign origin or introduced from abroad, not fully naturalized or acclimatized. Sometimes many exotic plants become economically important in its new home, such as rubber, tea, coffee, jute, tobacco, oil palm, sugarcane, potato, wheat, maize, and soybean. About 300 exotic plants occur in Bangladesh. These include food plants, timber plants, ornamental plants, oil plants, tannin plants, beverage plants or weeds. Many important fruit plants like papaya, guava, pineapple, litchi, sapota, pumelo, black berries, watermelon, and custard apple are also the important exotic plants. Many timber plants like teak, jarul, and painkado were introduced from Myanmar; sissoo from sub-Himalaya; mahogany, rain tree and ipil-ipil from America. Some other economic plants like gum arabic, rubber, coffee, sesame, soybean, sunflower, maize, wheat are of the recent introduced crop plants. Common oil-yielding plants (mustard, linseed, safflower, groundnut, niger seed, and sesame) are also exotic ones. Some important vegetables like potato, sweet gourd, lady';s finger are also exotic. Pulses like lentil, pea, chickpea and lathyrus are also exotic. Some exotic weeds are Croton bonplandianum, Argemone maxicana, Eichornia crassipes, Eupatorium odoratum and Mikania cordata. Some recent exotic tree species are Acacia and pine. [Mostafa Kamal Pasha] [Pasha, Mostafa Kamal Professor of Botany, Chittagong University]