Naming of Textile plants - harakeke, flax or hemp!

Maori Woman twisting Harake

This is a woman from New Zealand twisting yarn from the plant Phormium tenax, which in her local language was harake. But as in most cultures, it was not the makers them-selves who documented the textile making and therefore one must be vigilant about how fiber plants were named.

In fact, in the older writings, words like fibers were not used at all, instead a plant was named after what the scribe thought resembled a plant species. Therefore, many plants have been called flax (Linum), and in the case of harake, it has also been called New Zealand hemp. In other words, not all flax is flax, or all hemp (Cannabis) is hemp and as a historian one must interpret the writings with this starting point. Even today, textile cultures are not documented by the makers, usually by outsiders and leading to a number of misunderstandings when it comes to botany and terminology.