Dire Dawa

'Dire Dawa' is a germplasm-bank basil rather than a bred commercial cultivar: USDA plant explorer William Andrew Archer collected it in 1951 at Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia, and it sat in the USDA's North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station at Ames, Iowa until the Experimental Farm Network obtained it and put it back into circulation among seed savers. The USDA files it as Ocimum basilicum, but EFN notes the plant does not read as a straightforward sweet basil and suspects hybrid ancestry, possibly involving clove basil (Ocimum gratissimum) or the Ethiopian tulsi known as besobela. It has quiet importance in basil breeding history, having served as a parent in the development of the cultivar 'Maria Bonita', and USDA records note its essential oil has shown antinociceptive and antigiardial activity. For a gardener it is a collector's basil, grown for an aroma no seed-rack variety offers rather than for uniformity or yield.