| Avena | |
|---|---|
| Common Wild Oat, Avena fatua Note extreme similarity to Common Oat |
|
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| (unranked): | Angiosperms |
| (unranked): | Monocots |
| (unranked): | Commelinids |
| Order: | Poales |
| Family: | Poaceae |
| Subfamily: | Pooideae |
| Tribe: | Aveneae |
| Genus: | Avena L. |
| Species | |
|
Around one dozen, see text |
|
The oats (Avena) are a genus of 10-15 species of true grasses (family Poaceae).[1] They are native to Europe, Asia and northwest Africa. One species is widely cultivated elsewhere, and several have become naturalized in many parts of the world. All oats have edible seeds, though they are small and hard to harvest in most species.
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Avena species, including cultivated oats, are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including Rustic Shoulder-knot and Setaceous Hebrew Character.
For diseases of oats, see List of oats diseases.
One species is of major commercial importance as a cereal grain. Four other species are grown as crops of minor or regional importance.
These species, called wild oats or oat-grasses, are nuisance weeds in cereal crops, as, being grasses like the crop, they cannot be chemically removed; any herbicide that would kill them would also damage the crop.
"Sowing wild oats" is a phrase used since at least the 16th century; it appears in a 1542 tract by Thomas Beccon, a Protestant clergyman from Norfolk. Apparently, a similar expression was used in Roman Republican times already, e.g. by Plautus. The origin of the expression is the fact that wild oats, notably A. fatua, are a major weed in oat farming. Among European cereal grains, oats are hardest to tell apart from their weed relatives, which look almost alike but yield little grain. The life cycle of A. fatua is nearly synchronous with that of Common Oat (see also Vavilovian mimicry) and in former times it could only be kept at bay by checking one's oat plants one by one and hand-weeding the wild ones when they were in flower but the grains had not ripened yet, lest the wild oats seeded themselves out. Consequently, "sowing wild oats" became a way to describe unprofitable activities. Given the reputation of oat grain to have invigorating properties and the obvious connection between plant seeds and human "seed", it is not surprising that the meaning of the phrase shifted towards more or less explicitly referring to the destructive sexual liaisons of an unmarried young male, possibly resulting in unwanted children born out of wedlock.[4]