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The wild plant is a weedy little herb that prefers to grow on limestone outcroppings all around the coastal Mediterranean region. It is a biennial plant that uses food reserves stored over the winter in its rosette of leaves to produce a spike of a few yellow flowers at the end of its second summer before dying. Those nutritious leaves make its domesticated derivatives important food crops in much of the world now. Enterprising farmers over the last several thousand years contributed to domesticating several distinct lineages of B. oleracea, each amplifying different parts of this wild plant to produce several vegetable varieties, or cultivar groups or subspecies (“ssp.”): kale and collard greens (ssp. acephala), Chinese broccoli (ssp. alboglabra), red and green cabbages (ssp. capitata), savoy cabbage (ssp. sabauda) kohlrabi (ssp. gongylodes), Brussels sprouts (ssp. gemmifera), broccoli (ssp. italica), and cauliflower (ssp. botrytis). These varieties look dramatically – sometimes comically – different but are nonetheless considered to be the same species because they are all still interfertile, capable of mating with one another and producing fertile offspring.