Tomato

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum, syn. Lycopersicon lycopersicum) is a herbaceous, usually sprawling plant in the Solanaceae or nightshade family, as are its close cousins tobacco, chili peppers, potato, and eggplant. It is a perennial, often grown outdoors in temperate climates as an annual, typically reaching to 1-3m (3 to 10 ft) in height, with a weak, woody stem that often vines over other plants.

The leaves are 10–25 cm long, odd pinnate, with 5–9 leaflets on petioles, each leaflet up to 8cm long, with a serrated margin; both the stem and leaves are densely glandular-hairy. The flowers are 1–2cm across, yellow, with five pointed lobes on the corolla; they are borne in a cyme of 3–12 together.

The tomato is native to Central, South, and southern North America from Mexico to Argentina. There is evidence that the first domesticated tomato was a little yellow fruit, ancestor of L. cerasiforme, grown by the Aztecs in Mexico, who called it xitomatl (pronounced shi-to-ma-tlh), meaning "plump thing with a navel". The word tomato comes from a word in the Nahuatl language, tomatl. The specific name, lycopersicum, means "wolf-peach" (compare the related species Solanum lycocarpum, whose scientific name means "wolf-fruit", common name "wolf-apple"), as they are a major food of wild canids in South America.