Cultural Use of Homegarden Plants in an Indigenous Community in North West Ethiopia

Abstract Background; The floristic composition of homegardens in Northwest Ethiopia in general, and the Gozamin district in particular, has received little research attention. The purpose of this research is to better understand the floristic composition and cultural significance of homegardens. Methods; Stratified random sampling procedure was used based on agroecological variation in selected kebeles. The homegarden data were collected by dividing the homegarden into four quadrats, the first quadrat stretched from the farmer’s home to 10m, the second quadrat from10m to 20m, the third quadrat from 20m to 30m and the fourth quadrat from 30m to 40m horizontally using farmer’s house as reference depending on the size of the garden. A semi-structured interview was carried out to document the informant’s knowledge on plant species.Results; A total of 238 culturally important plant species from 81 families were identified. Of these 39% were herbs,29% shrubs, 6% were climbers. Perennials made up the largest part of cultivated species (83%), whereas annuals made up the rest (17%). The Poaceae family had the foremost species, with 22, taken after by the Fabaceae, which had 21, and the Asteraceae which had 15. From these recorded plants,140(58.6%) were species utilized for environmental uses, 84(35%) food crops, 83(34.7%) medicinal plant species, 39(16.3%) fodder species, 57(23.8%) material use plants, 60(25%) fuel wood species, 50(21%) social use plants and 1(0.4%) poisonous. The direct matrix ranking revealed that Cordia Africana was found a versatile culturally important plant in the area which was also extremely threatened, followed by Ficus sur. Cordia africana highest use-value was for Building and the list value was for medicinal. The Sorensen similarity index for 64 percent of the locations investigated was less than 0.5.Conclusion; The result showed that homegardens are multi-functional, long-term production systems. Food security and biodiversity conservation are continuously supported by tribal populations cultural knowledge connected with their homegardens. The less similarity/high species diversity in the area between kebeles indicated that there was high species diversity this was due to different range of agroecological conditions among kebeles.