Over the months there has been talk of the history of Paulownia, about characteristics and advantages deriving from its cultivation. Let us now briefly see its spread throughout the world.
If historically in China this beautiful plant boasts a thousand-year tradition linked to customs and traditions but also to religious and political aspects, it is necessary to emphasize that this nation has renewed its cultivation, aware of its characteristics, to relaunch agriculture, giving shape to a successful intercropping system. Little by little, given the successes found in purely agricultural areas, at the beginning of the 1980s its cultivation was extended to the plains and used in the agroforestry to combat the problems related to the erosion of slopes and canals, of roads, for its overwhelming properties, as well as for the production of timber.
It should be emphasized that these characteristics have been well seen globally, so much so that to date the plant is not only widespread but widely used for the same purposes on all five continents.
After China, Japan is the largest grower of Paulownia. As already mentioned, the Land of the Rising Sun is also permeated by a culture linked to the plant but it has given a turn in an economic and ecological sense in its use.
Then we move on to America, especially in the south-eastern areas, where its cultivation in arboriculture was carried out at a massive level as early as the 1990s.
During the same period China and Australia made a cooperation, having recognized how the cultivation of this plant makes profitable business development possible.
The cultivation for economic purposes and agroforestry restoration are now well established also in the Old Continent and various countries exploit all the possibilities – renewal of exploited or impoverished agricultural areas, intercropping, timber production, use for bioenergetic purposes and so on. Large production areas have been found for decades in England, Spain, Romania, Poland, and so on.
Least but not last, our dear Italy. It is possible to find large areas with Paulownia files in Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and the South, all sites that, as noted in a previous article, have showed positive and growing results.
Comforting data, therefore, if you think that the whole world is focusing on what has been called the “Plant of the future”.
