<p>Enset (<i>Ensete ventricosum</i>) is a perennial, clonally propagated staple crop central to the subsistence, culture, and identity of more than 20 million people in Ethiopia. Building on prior work, this study offers an extended analysis of enset diversity, focusing on the methods of cognition, creation, and conservation of landraces among the Shekacho people. A study was conducted involving 160 households across eight villages in the Masha and Andracha districts of Sheka Zone, Southwest Ethiopia. The findings indicated that the Sheka place great cultural significance on cultivating a wide range of enset landraces. The survey recorded 127 distinct names, with 82 being actively cultivated. When considering those found on the farms of non-sampled households, around 105 landraces are currently maintained in Sheka. Garden-level richness ranged from 4 to 36 grown landraces, with a specific village containing up to 54 landraces, showing exceptional diversity for a clonally propagated crop like enset. Folk wisdom integrates morphological attributes, cultural symbolism, and ecological adaptation, creating a cognition system that maintains fine-scale phenotypic variation. The Sheka-enset case exemplifies the mechanisms behind the creation of landrace diversity, which are described as a non-causal process involving interactions between plants and humans. Both conscious and unconscious creation practices—including ritual protection of wild enset groves, seed exchange networks, protection of seed-propagated seedlings, as well as the maintenance of clan-linked and non-utilitarian enset clones—function as a robust on-farm conservation system. The Sheka’s management efforts serve as a notable example of folk in-situ conservation and contribute to broader theoretical thoughts regarding cognitive selection and cultural niche construction in the evolution of clonal crops. </p>