Palms provide an enormous range of useful products. Only in the 1990s has plastic begun to replace cork in stoppers for wine bottles, a use for which cork has been pre-eminent since the invention of the modern glass bottle in 1760.
Natural rubber is one of the most widely used of all plant products.
They support large communities of invertebrates and are food for marine mammals like manatees. The active principle, a group of alkaloids including theobromine, is a stimulant so powerful that the Aztecs and Mayas regarded it as sacred. Several ancient Meso-American cultivars are now all but extinct. Many gums and resins are still harvested from wild plants. Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, described how villagers around the Aegean Sea would gather a sticky exudate from aromatic shrubs by combing the hair of grazing goats and beating plants on hot days with leather rakes.