Burlap

Burlap, called hessian outside North America, is the coarsest working cloth in the catalogue: a rough, loose plain weave of jute fiber, cheap, breathable, and strong enough to hold what is poured into it. It is the cloth of the sack, of coffee and grain and potatoes, of sandbags and gunny sacks, of the painter's coarsest canvas and the gardener's root wrap. Jute milled in Bengal and Dundee made and moved the commodities of empire, and the smell of burlap is still the smell of a feed store.