Hi, its me again, the annoying plant scientist who spends way more time thinking about Cardassians than is probably healthy. In my previous posts on Hebitian and Cardassian agriculture, I discussed what type of agronomic systems those societies might use.
But I didn’t really discuss what KINDS of plants might grow on Cardassia.

Obviously, I needed to rectify that oversight.

Its been hypothesized by the fandom (i love you all) that Cardassians are similar to a class of extinct earth creatures known as therapsids. The therapsids have characteristics of both mammals and reptiles - similar to Cardassians, and Cardassian voles. Thus, I thought, hey lets look at the plants that exist in the same fossil strata as therapsids (Permian Era, for those who would like to do their own research) and extrapolate that Cardassian plant life might look like that.

First, I’d imagine thick swampy rainforests made of giant plants similar to clubmosses, quillworts and horsetails.

These plants don’t bear seeds, instead they produce spores in large cone like structures. Also, they have green trunks, made up of leaf pads (scars from where large leaves fell off). They’d have few branches - only a little branching at the top of the plants.

Its my hypothesis that the original jungle like vegetation on Cardassia was primarily made up of these plants. Hebitians might have bred the plants to have edible cones, leaves or rhizomes (underground stems - think potatoes). Since the spores of these plants tend to contain oil (in fact they’re highly flammable), early Hebitians might have bred plants to grow larger spores, with higher oil content.

Assuming that Cardassian plants, like earth plants, experience an alternation of generations, and assuming their plants reproduced in a similar manner, these plantlets would have needed a wet environment to allow their antheridia to swim to the archegonia (these are the haploid generation plants). Thus, they would have been some of the first casualties of the devastating climate change on Cardassia.

However, they still exist on the Ba’aten Penninsula, in some private gardens, and in the large botanical institutes.

The Cardassian/Hebitian diet changed drastically after the climate change, as these plants were no longer available. Instead, Cardassians switched to a more meat/grain heavy diet - based on the plants that had once only grown on the drier areas of Cardassia - and the animals also found there.

I don’t have any strong headcanons about the dryland plants of Cardassia, so if people wanna contribute, feel free! (Just let me knooowww about them.)