Cardamom - Varieties

Varieties

There were initially three natural varieties of green cardamom plants.

• Malabar (Nadan/Native), as the name suggests, is the native variety of Kerala. These plants have panicles which grow horizontally along the ground.
• Mysore, as the name suggests, is a native variety of Karnataka. These plants have panicles which grow vertically upwards.
• Vazhuka is a naturally occurring hybrid between Malabar and Mysore varieties, and the panicles grow neither vertically nor horizontally, but in between.

Recently, a few planters isolated high-yielding plants and started multiplying them on a large scale. The most popular high-yielding variety is 'Njallani'. 'Njallani, also known as rup-ree-t, is a unique high-yielding cardamom variety developed by an Indian farmer, Sebastian Joseph, at Kattappana in the South Indian state of Kerala. K. J. Baby of Idukki district, Kerala, has developed a purely white flowered variety of Vazhuka type green cardamom having higher yield than Njallani. The variety has high adaptability to different shade conditions and can also be grown in waterlogged areas.