Purple Cashew (Anacardium occidentale L.): a Unique Cashew Type

Cashew is a dollar earning crop, introduced to India from Brazil, by Portuguese travellers, and it is one of the commercially important nut crops in the world owing to its nutritional value and export earnings. Cashew belongs to the family Anacardiaceae which is having other species also with great socio-economic importance. Cashew being perennial in nature consists of wide diversity with respect to plant vigour, canopy, yield, bold nut, cashew nut shell liquid, shelling percentage, cluster bearing, big apple types, early maturity, etc. The variability among and within the family has made cashew as a genetic heritage for conservation as well as crop improvement programmes. Among this, pigmented cashew stands as a unique cashew type with whole plant in purple colour which serve as a morphological marker as well as contribute to the genetic divergence with respect to quantitative as well as qualitative traits. Therefore, in this study, we documented the important features of this natural mutant purple cashew which stand apart as a novel cashew genotype.