Celery

Celery (Apium), a widely distributed genus of Umbellifere. The common celery (A. graveolens) is found wild in Britain and most parts of Europe, in ditches, brooks, &c., especially near the sea and in saline soils, and is acrid and uneatable. In cultivation, however, abundant nutrition has greatly mollified its properties, and two principal forms have arisen—one in which an abundant development of parenchyma has taken place in the leaf-stalks; the other in which it affects the root—while these again possess their sub-varieties. The former sort is the common celery of British gardens, where the familiar long blanched succulent stalks are produced by transplanting the seedlings into richly manured trenches, which are filled up as the plants grow, and finally raised into ridges over which little more than the tops of the leaves appear; and a supply is thus insured throughout the whole winter. The other form is the turnip-rooted celery, or celeriac, and is now largely cultivated on the Continent. Both forms are eaten uncooked alone, or in salads, or in soups, or as a boiled or stewed vegetable, and are pleasant and wholesome, although when used too freely or frequently they are diuretic and aphrodisiac. Some authorities identify celery, instead of the closely related Parsley (q.v.), as the Apium with which victors in the Isthmian and other games were crowned, and of which the Greeks were also wont to twine their sepulchral garlands.