Celery: History and Origins

Celery has one of the strangest histories of any vegetable on the plate. For most of the three thousand years it appears in the written record, nobody ate it as a vegetable at all. Wild celery — Apium graveolens, the marsh plant English gardeners called smallage — is bitter, stringy and medicinal, and the ancient world treated it accordingly: as a drug, as a funeral plant, and as the leaf woven into victory crowns at the Greek games. The sweet, mild, thick-stalked celery in the supermarket is a comparatively recent invention, produced by Italian and French gardeners of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who learned to blanch the stalks by burying them. That transformation turned a bitter herb into a luxury, and for roughly a century celery was expensive enough that Victorian Britain and Gilded-Age America served it upright in dedicated cut-glass celery vases as a display of wealth. It then became a patent-medicine tonic, then the crop that made a Michigan town call itself “Celery City”, and finally the cheapest thing in the produce aisle. This article traces that documented record and labels the legends plainly where the evidence is thin.

Table of Contents

  1. Smallage: The Bitter Wild Ancestor
  2. Egypt: Garlands for the Dead
  3. Greece: Homer, Wreaths, and a Funeral Proverb
  4. A City Named for the Plant
  5. Rome: Medicine, Flavouring, and Hangover Cures
  6. Medieval Europe: A Physic-Garden Plant
  7. The Italian Invention: Blanching and Sweet Celery
  8. One Species, Three Vegetables
  9. The Celery Vase: A Luxury on the Victorian Table
  10. The Celery Tonic Craze
  11. Celery City: Kalamazoo, Michigan
  12. The Modern Crop
  13. Research Papers and References
  14. Connections
  15. Featured Videos

Smallage: The Bitter Wild Ancestor

Wild celery is still growing, and you can find it. It is a biennial of the carrot family (Apiaceae) that lives in wet, salty places — ditches, tidal marshes, brackish riverbanks and coastal seeps — across Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and temperate Asia. Botanically it is the same species as the vegetable, Apium graveolens, and the species name is a clue to what it was known for: graveolens means “strong-smelling”. That aroma comes from a family of compounds called phthalides, and it is the single most recognisable thing about celery in any form.

Wild celery is not pleasant to eat. The stalks are thin, hollow, fibrous and aggressively bitter, and the plant carries a higher load of the defensive chemicals its family is known for — including the furanocoumarins that can make skin burn in sunlight (covered in detail on the Allergy and Photosensitivity page). English herbalists called it smallage, from Old French ache (itself from the Latin apium) with the prefix “small” distinguishing it from parsley. Smallage was a medicine and a pot-herb for flavouring, in the same conceptual bin as parsley, fennel and lovage — all Apiaceae, all pungent, all used a leaf at a time.

Modern genetic work on wild Apium graveolens populations in Europe confirms the picture that the historical record implies: cultivated celery was drawn out of a widespread, variable wild plant rather than domesticated once in a single place, and the wild populations remain genetically distinct enough that conservationists treat them as a crop wild relative worth protecting. There is no dramatic origin story here — no single valley, no founding farmer. What there is instead is a long record of a bitter marsh plant that people found useful long before they found it tasty.

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Egypt: Garlands for the Dead

The oldest hard evidence for people handling celery is not a recipe. It is a wreath.

Ancient Egyptian tombs preserve floral collars and garlands — layered arrangements of leaves, petals and berries sewn onto strips of papyrus and placed on the mummy and the coffins. Because Egypt is dry, this plant material survives in identifiable condition thousands of years later. When the botanical remains from Tutankhamun’s tomb were examined after the 1922 excavation, the leaves used in the garlands were identified species by species, and celery leaves — Apium graveolens — were among them, alongside olive, willow, cornflower, blue water lily and other plants.

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not show. It shows that Egyptians of the fourteenth century BCE had access to celery, recognised it, and considered it appropriate for the most elaborate funerary display their culture produced. It does not show that they ate it as a vegetable, and there is no evidence that they did. Celery leaves in Egyptian garlands sit alongside a broader Egyptian and Near Eastern habit of using aromatic, bitter and strongly scented plants in funerary and ritual contexts — where the smell itself was part of the point.

The same distinction runs through the next thousand years of the record. Celery is present, celery is valued, and celery is not food.

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Greece: Homer, Wreaths, and a Funeral Proverb

The Greek word for the plant is selinon. It turns up early: in the Odyssey, the meadows around Calypso’s cave are described as soft with violets and selinon, and in the Iliad horses graze on marsh-growing selinon. Both passages describe a wet-ground plant, which fits wild celery well. One honest caveat belongs here: ancient Greek plant names do not map cleanly onto modern species, and selinon is used by different authors for what we would separate into celery, parsley and related Apiaceae. Translators render it variously. The safest reading is that selinon covers wild celery and its close relatives as a group, and that the Homeric passages are describing a marsh plant of that group rather than a garden vegetable.

Where the Greek record becomes unambiguous is in ritual. Selinon was a crown plant. At the Nemean Games — one of the four great panhellenic athletic festivals — victors were crowned with a wreath of wild celery, and the Isthmian Games at Corinth also used celery for their crown during part of their history before pine became standard. This puts celery in a very short list: the Olympic crown was wild olive, the Pythian was laurel, and the Nemean was celery. A plant nobody wanted to eat was, at the same moment, one of the highest honours in the Greek world.

Celery was also a plant of graves. Greeks planted it on burial sites and associated it with death firmly enough that it generated a proverb: to say a sick man “has need only of celery” was to say he was finished. Plutarch records the expression, and the same association explains why the Nemean crown — awarded at games whose founding legend involves the death of the infant Opheltes — used a funerary plant rather than a festive one. The Greeks were not confused about this; the mourning association and the victory crown were the same idea seen from two sides.

Medically, Greek writers used selinon as a diuretic, a digestive and a remedy for a range of complaints. The traditional use of celery seed for the circulation that later Chinese, Ayurvedic and European herbal traditions all record has its western beginning here.

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A City Named for the Plant

One piece of evidence for how much celery mattered to the Greeks is not written at all — it is stamped in silver.

The Greek colony of Selinus on the south-west coast of Sicily, founded in the seventh century BCE and known today as Selinunte, took its name from the wild celery growing in the marshy ground around it. From the sixth century BCE the city struck coins bearing a celery leaf as its civic badge — a “speaking type”, a visual pun on the city’s own name. Those coins survive in quantity in museum collections, and the leaf on them is a plain, five-lobed Apiaceae leaf that anyone who has bought a bunch of leafy celery will recognise instantly.

The city was destroyed by Carthage in 409 BCE and never fully recovered, but its coinage is one of the most concrete surviving statements about celery in the ancient Mediterranean: an entire Greek city identified itself, on its money, with a marsh weed.

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Rome: Medicine, Flavouring, and Hangover Cures

The Romans inherited the plant and the Latin name apium, which is the ancestor of the modern botanical genus. Roman writers on agriculture and medicine treat it much as the Greeks did: as a useful herb rather than a vegetable course. Pliny the Elder discusses apium at length among the plants of the garden and the pharmacy, describing uses that run from digestive complaints to wound dressings, and noting the plant’s association with funerals.

Two Roman habits are worth recording because they survived into later European practice. The first is culinary: celery leaf and celery seed were used as seasonings, in the same way that the surviving Roman recipe collection attributed to Apicius uses lovage, rue and other pungent Apiaceae. This is celery as a spice, and it is the direct ancestor of modern celery seed and celery salt. The second is social: Romans wore celery garlands at banquets in the belief that the plant’s aroma tempered the effects of wine. The belief was wrong, but it is a reminder that for the classical world celery’s smell was its most notable property — the same phthalide aroma discussed on the Flavones and Phthalides page.

Roman agriculture did select for improved forms of some herbs, and it is likely that cultivated smallage — a fatter, less bitter version of the wild plant — existed in Roman gardens. But nothing in the Roman record describes anything like a modern celery stalk, and no Roman text treats celery as a vegetable eaten in quantity.

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Medieval Europe: A Physic-Garden Plant

Through the medieval period celery stays where the Romans left it: in the medicine garden. Apium appears in the lists of plants that Carolingian, monastic and later medieval European gardens were expected to grow, and medieval herbals prescribe smallage for a familiar range of complaints — urinary problems, digestive trouble, fevers, and as a general “opening” or diuretic remedy.

Two things about this period matter for the story. First, the plant grown was still smallage: thin, bitter, leafy, harvested a stem or a handful of leaves at a time. Second, medieval herbal medicine handled celery with a caution that turns out to have been well founded. Herbals repeatedly warn against celery for people with certain conditions and note that handling it can irritate the skin. That is a genuine observation about a real hazard — the furanocoumarins in the plant cause a delayed, sunlight-dependent skin burn that was not chemically explained until the twentieth century.

Celery seed also enters the European drug trade in this period as a distinct article, separate from the herb, and it never really leaves. Celery seed is still sold as a spice and as a herbal remedy for the circulation and for gout today, and it is the form used in almost every modern clinical trial of celery — a point worth keeping in mind whenever a study result is quoted as though it were about the vegetable.

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The Italian Invention: Blanching and Sweet Celery

The vegetable we actually eat is an Italian achievement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the technique that made it possible is blanching.

The principle is simple and the effect is dramatic. If you heap soil, straw, boards or paper around growing celery stalks so they develop in darkness, the plant cannot make chlorophyll in the covered tissue. The stalks come up pale, and — far more importantly — they accumulate much less of the bitter and defensive chemistry that light-grown stalks produce. Blanched celery is milder, sweeter, more tender and dramatically less bitter than the same plant grown in full sun. Italian gardeners combined this technique with steady selection for plants that produced thick, fleshy, upright leaf-stalks rather than thin ones, and within a couple of generations of gardening the result was a new vegetable.

From Italy the improved plant moved to France and then northwards. By the later seventeenth century celery appears in English and French garden and cookery writing as a salad plant of some prestige. John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) is a useful marker: he describes “Sellery” as formerly a medicinal plant, now “for its high and grateful Taste” given the place of honour in the grand salad at great men’s tables. That sentence records the whole transition in a line — a drug becoming a delicacy, and a delicacy for the rich in particular.

The reason for the expense is worth stating, because it explains everything that follows. Blanched celery was labour-intensive. It required trenching, repeated earthing-up as the plant grew, careful timing, and a long season in ground that could be kept moist. It was a crop for a skilled gardener with staff, not a field crop. Celery was expensive because it was difficult, and it stayed difficult until self-blanching varieties and mechanised growing arrived in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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One Species, Three Vegetables

All of the following are Apium graveolens. Selection produced three quite different vegetables from the one marsh plant, and they are usually treated as separate botanical varieties or cultivar groups.

An important consequence for anyone reading the research literature: these three vegetables, plus celery seed, have genuinely different chemistry. Cutting celery and celery seed carry far more of the aromatic and defensive compounds than blanched stalk celery does. When a paper reports a striking effect from “celery”, the first question is always which one.

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The Celery Vase: A Luxury on the Victorian Table

This is the part of celery’s history that surprises almost everyone.

Because blanched celery was difficult and expensive to grow, and because it arrived on the table looking pale, tall and architectural, nineteenth-century Britain and America treated it as a status vegetable — and invented a piece of tableware specifically to show it off. The celery vase is a tall, footed, straight-sided glass, usually cut or pressed and often elaborately decorated, made to stand in the middle of the dining table with celery stalks arranged upright inside it, leafy tops out, in a little water.

It was not a niche object. Celery vases were a standard line for British and American glasshouses through the second half of the nineteenth century, made in cut lead crystal at the expensive end and in pressed glass for households with less money and the same aspirations. Later services added matching celery boats or trays for the version served lying down. Antique dealers still sell them by the shelf-load, and they are frequently mistaken today for vases, spooners or general-purpose glasses because the object outlived its purpose so completely.

The menus match the glassware. Gilded-Age American restaurant menus, including those of the most expensive establishments of the period, list celery as its own item — not as a garnish but as a course or a named relish, priced alongside oysters and olives. Celery on the table meant the host could afford celery. Within a few decades, mechanised growing and self-blanching varieties made it one of the cheapest vegetables in the shop, and the vases went to the attic.

It is a genuinely useful piece of history, because it makes a general point about food fashion: the prestige of a food often tracks how hard it is to produce rather than how good or nutritious it is. Celery did not change. Its price did.

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The Celery Tonic Craze

The late nineteenth century produced a second, stranger celery boom: the patent-medicine tonic.

Celery had an old, genuine reputation as a nerve and circulation remedy, which the patent-medicine trade of the 1880s and 1890s took up enthusiastically. The most famous product was Paine’s Celery Compound, marketed from Vermont as a cure for nervous exhaustion, sleeplessness, “neuralgia” and a long list of other complaints. Like most patent medicines of the era its effect on the customer owed rather more to its substantial alcohol content than to its celery, and it belongs squarely in the history of nineteenth-century medical advertising rather than the history of pharmacology. Dozens of imitators followed — celery bitters, celery nerve tonics, celery elixirs — because “celery” on a label in 1890 signalled health the way “probiotic” does now.

One product from that wave is still on the shelf. Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, a celery-flavoured soda made with celery seed, began life in Brooklyn in the late nineteenth century as a tonic, became a fixture of Jewish delicatessen culture in New York, and survives today as a soft drink — the branding shifted from “tonic” to “soda” as American food-labelling rules tightened on medical claims. If you have ever wondered why a celery-flavoured fizzy drink exists at all, that is the answer: it is a surviving fragment of the 1890s tonic craze.

The parallel with the modern celery juice movement is close enough to be worth stating plainly. In both cases a real but modest plant — genuinely rich in potassium, nitrate and flavones — was attached to sweeping claims about curing chronic illness, promoted through a mass medium (mail-order advertising then, social media now), and sold on testimony rather than evidence. Celery has been through this before.

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Celery City: Kalamazoo, Michigan

American celery growing has a capital, and it is Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The ingredient that made it possible was soil. South-west Michigan has large deposits of drained marshland — deep, black, water-retentive muck soil left by post-glacial wetlands. Celery is a marsh plant that demands constant moisture and heavy feeding, and muck land suits it almost perfectly. From the 1860s onward, Dutch immigrant farmers around Kalamazoo drained the marshes and turned them over to celery, and by the closing decades of the century the region was producing it on an industrial scale.

The marketing was as important as the farming. Kalamazoo growers sold celery directly to rail passengers — children meeting trains at the station with bunches of washed, trimmed stalks — and shipped it out under the city’s name across the United States. Kalamazoo called itself “Celery City”, put celery on its promotional literature, and made the crop part of its civic identity for the better part of fifty years.

The industry eventually moved. California’s coastal valleys can grow celery nearly year-round, mechanisation favoured very large flat fields, and the Michigan muck lands were gradually built over or turned to other crops. Michigan still grows celery commercially, but the centre of gravity shifted west. The Kalamazoo story is preserved in local museums and in the region’s place names, and it is the reason celery has a stronger claim on Michigan’s food history than almost any other vegetable.

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The Modern Crop

Three developments turned celery from a gardener’s luxury into a commodity.

  1. Self-blanching and green varieties. Nineteenth-century breeders in France and the United States released varieties that either blanched themselves — growing pale without trenching — or, more importantly, tasted acceptable while green. The green Pascal type introduced in the 1880s is the ancestor of most modern commercial celery. Once the vegetable no longer had to be buried to be edible, the labour cost collapsed.
  2. Irrigation and mechanisation. Celery is thirsty, shallow-rooted and harvested by hand-cutting even now, but flat, irrigated, precisely fertilised fields in California, Michigan, Spain, Italy and Mexico turned it into a scheduled, year-round crop rather than a seasonal one.
  3. Cold chain. Celery is about ninety-five percent water and wilts fast. Refrigerated transport and hydro-cooling are what allow a stalk cut in Ventura County to arrive crisp in a shop two thousand miles away.

Alongside the fresh vegetable, celery now has a substantial industrial life. Celery seed and celery salt remain standard spices. Celery powder and celery juice concentrate are used as a nitrate source in meat curing, which is why an “uncured” label so often lists celery in the ingredients — a genuinely misleading piece of labelling that the Blood Pressure and Dietary Nitrate page takes apart. And celery seed extract is sold as a supplement for blood pressure and gout, which is the form most of the clinical research actually studied.

The most recent chapter is the one most readers arrived through. From around 2018 a social-media movement promoted drinking sixteen ounces of celery juice on an empty stomach every morning as a treatment for chronic illness. Demand rose sharply enough to move commodity celery prices, and the claims — which originate from stated spiritual revelation rather than research — are examined in full on The Celery Juice Claims. As the tonic craze of the 1890s shows, this is not the first time celery has been asked to carry more than it can.

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Research Papers and References

Celery’s early history is documented mainly in archaeobotany, classical texts, numismatics and horticultural history rather than in the biomedical literature, so the list below mixes peer-reviewed papers with reference works and curated topic searches. Author names, titles and journals are plain text; only the stable identifier is a link, and every external link opens in a new tab. Ancient writers named in the article — Homer, Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Dioscorides — are cited as historical sources, not as modern references.

  1. Frese L, Bönisch M, Nachtigall M, et al. Patterns of genetic diversity and implications for in situ conservation of wild celery (Apium graveolens L. ssp. graveolens). Agriculture. 2018;8(9):129. — doi:10.3390/agriculture8090129
  2. CABI. Apium graveolens (celery). CABI Compendium. 2019. — doi:10.1079/cabicompendium.6599
  3. CABI. Apium graveolens var. dulce (celery). CABI Compendium. 2019. — doi:10.1079/cabicompendium.6597
  4. CABI. Apium graveolens var. rapaceum (celeriac). CABI Compendium. 2019. — doi:10.1079/cabicompendium.6598
  5. Kokotkiewicz A, Luczkiewicz M. Celery (Apium graveolens var. dulce (Mill.) Pers.) oils. In: Essential Oils in Food Preservation, Flavor and Safety. 2016:325-338. — doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-416641-7.00037-7
  6. Kooti W, Daraei N. A review of the antioxidant activity of celery (Apium graveolens L). Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine. 2017;22(4):1029-1034. — doi:10.1177/2156587217717415
  7. Chaudhary SK, Ceska O, Warrington PJ, Ashwood-Smith MJ. Increased furocoumarin content of celery during storage. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 1985;33(6):1153-1157. — doi:10.1021/jf00066a032 — the chemistry behind the skin irritation medieval herbals had already noticed.
  8. Berkley SF, Hightower AW, Beier RC, et al. Dermatitis in grocery workers associated with high natural concentrations of furanocoumarins in celery. Annals of Internal Medicine. 1986;105(3):351-355. — doi:10.7326/0003-4819-105-3-351
  9. Sebranek JG, Bacus JN. Cured meat products without direct addition of nitrate or nitrite: what are the issues? Meat Science. 2007;77(1):136-147. — doi:10.1016/j.meatsci.2007.03.025 — how celery powder became an industrial curing agent.
  10. Illes J, Rodrigues J. The influence of celery (Apium graveolens) juice on hypertension. In: Reference Series in Phytochemistry. 2024:501-523. — doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38663-3_72
  11. Celery domestication, cultivar groups and horticultural history — PubMed: Apium graveolens domestication and cultivar history
  12. Plants in ancient Egyptian funerary garlands and archaeobotanical remains — PubMed: Egyptian funerary garland archaeobotany
  13. Celeriac and cutting celery: composition and cultivar-group differences — PubMed: celeriac and cutting celery composition

External Resources

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