What made silphium difficult to domesticate?

I am trying my hand at a matriarchal society (human beings, technology similar to Earth's 13th - 16th century), and I find that for that to work they will need reasonably efficient contraceptives (and abortives as a backup, of course).

In pre-industrial Earth, that role was fulfilled by a now-extinct plant called silphium, and I am of course tempted to feature this plant as the staple contraceptive in Sara, but unhappily it seems that silphium could suffer the same fate there as in Earth, and be overharvested into extinction, as it is apparently non-domesticable.

So I am wondering, why exactly was it non-domesticable? Was it actually non-domesticable, or its domestication, like that of strawberries, just depended on some techonolgical innovation that was not available at the time it become extinct? What changes in society, or in the nature of the plant, could make it domesticable, or at least protect it from extinction?

posted over 7 years ago

Luís Henrique‭

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