Broccoli: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. One Wild Plant, Many Vegetables
2. Where Broccoli Came From: The Mediterranean Coast
3. Broccoli in Ancient Rome
4. The Name: From Brocco to Calabrese
5. Catherine de' Medici and the Journey to France
6. "Italian Asparagus" in England
7. Crossing the Atlantic: Jefferson and Italian Immigrant Growers
8. A Regional Crop Goes Global
9. Key Research Papers
10. Connections
11. Featured Videos

One Wild Plant, Many Vegetables

One of the most surprising facts about broccoli is that it is the same species as cabbage. Botanically, broccoli is Brassica oleracea — and so are cauliflower, kale, collard greens, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, and ordinary head cabbage. They look nothing alike on the plate, yet they are all cultivated forms of a single wild plant, shaped by generations of farmers who each favoured a different part: a swollen leaf bud became the cabbage, a thick edible stem became kohlrabi, a cluster of side buds became Brussels sprouts, and a dense mass of immature flower buds became broccoli and, by a closely related path, cauliflower. Broccoli is usually written as Brassica oleracea var. italica — the "italica" pointing straight at the Italian peninsula where its modern form took shape.

This matters for a history page because it tells us what kind of origin story broccoli has. There is no inventor and no single moment of creation. Broccoli is the product of artificial selection. Charles Darwin used the cabbage's cultivated varieties as one of his examples of it in On the Origin of Species (1859): to show that variation piles up in whatever part of a plant people value, he wrote, "See how different the leaves of the cabbage are, and how extremely alike the flowers." A 2021 genomic study likewise describes B. oleracea as "a model organism for understanding the power of artificial selection." To ask "who invented broccoli?" is a little like asking who invented the bulldog: the honest answer is that many people did, gradually, by choosing which plants to save seed from, year after year.

The wider Brassica family also includes mustard, turnip, and rapeseed, which is why these vegetables share a faintly peppery, sulfurous character — the same sulfur compounds that give broccoli both its distinctive smell and much of its modern reputation as a healthful food.

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Where Broccoli Came From: The Mediterranean Coast

The wild relatives of broccoli grow mainly on steep cliffs: more than ten closely related wild Brassica species on cliffs overhanging the Mediterranean, and wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea subsp. oleracea) along the Atlantic coasts of western Europe. All of them share the same set of nine chromosomes and can interbreed with the cultivated forms. Ancient Greek writers already knew the wild plant as an option for the table, though a more bitter or pungent one than the garden kinds — which makes the long human effort to improve it all the more striking.

Pinning down exactly where that improvement began has proved genuinely difficult, and the scholarship has shifted more than once. A 2018 survey of ancient Greek and Latin texts by Lorenzo Maggioni and colleagues describes two competing older hypotheses — domestication on the Atlantic coasts of northwest Europe, or somewhere in the Mediterranean — and concludes that the literary record adds weight to a Mediterranean origin. A 2021 genomic study by Makenzie Mabry and colleagues in Molecular Biology and Evolution, using RNA sequencing of 224 accessions, identified the Aegean endemic Brassica cretica as the closest living wild relative of cultivated B. oleracea, "supporting an origin of cultivation in the Eastern Mediterranean region." A 2022 study of 912 accessions by Cai and colleagues in Horticulture Research again stated that the crop's domestication "has not been clarified"; it found two lineages — a "leafy head" lineage and an "arrested inflorescence" lineage that includes broccoli and cauliflower — and proposed that cabbage domestication started in the Middle East. The precise birthplace is, in other words, still being worked out.

Broccoli specifically — as opposed to cabbage or kale — is traced to the Italian peninsula. Writing in 2020, the Cornell broccoli geneticists Zachary Stansell and Thomas Björkman summarise its history this way: broccoli was domesticated from wild relatives in the Mediterranean Basin and then improved into landrace types in the central Mediterranean, "most likely within the southern Italic Peninsula and Sicily." That Italian connection runs through the whole of broccoli's later story, from its name to the immigrants who eventually carried it across the Atlantic.

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Broccoli in Ancient Rome

Cabbage-family vegetables ("coles") were long familiar in the ancient Mediterranean: Maggioni's survey traces a well-established tradition of growing and using them in Greece since at least the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. By the first century CE the Roman agricultural writers Columella and Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) describe an "explosion" of forms: Columella names at least twelve types of cole, grown in central and southern Italy. Both writers distinguish the main plant from its cymae — the tender sprouts and young flower shoots a cole throws out in spring after it has been cut back. In his Natural History, Pliny calls these sprouts "of a more delicate and tender quality than the cole itself," and records that the gourmet Apicius "rejected these sprouts for the table." The Roman cookbook later known as De re coquinaria — compiled between the third and fifth centuries CE, and containing some recipes possibly first written by Apicius — nonetheless has six recipes for cimas et coliclos (sprouts and young stalks). One reads: "Cut the stalks in half and boil them. The leaves are mashed and seasoned with coriander, onion, cumin, pepper, raisin wine, or condensed wine and a little oil."

A note of caution is warranted, because ancient plant names are slippery. Maggioni and colleagues write that a bunch of Roman cymae "could have been anything between tender inflorescence tops and the current broccoli," and that the cookbook's recipes "do not allow an easy interpretation of the crop shapes." So it cannot be said that any ancient passage describes broccoli in the specific sense meant today. What the sources do show is that Romans grew many local cole types in central and southern Italy and valued their tender flowering shoots as food — the same part of the plant that later Italian selection turned into broccoli.

Some popular food histories also credit the Etruscans — the people of pre-Roman central Italy — with an early hand in growing these cabbages. No scholarly source located for this article documents it, so it is presented here only as a traditional claim.

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The Name: From Brocco to Calabrese

The word broccoli is unmistakably Italian. Etymological dictionaries trace it to the plural of the Italian broccolo, "cabbage sprout, head," a diminutive of brocco, "shoot, sprout," which in turn comes from the Latin broccus, "projecting, pointed." (Some popular histories derive it instead from the Latin brachium, "arm"; the dictionaries do not.) The name is a small piece of botany in itself: it describes the part of the plant that is eaten — the young flowering shoots.

The most common broccoli sold today is Calabrese broccoli, the large single-headed green type; calabrese is Italian for "Calabrian," after Calabria in the far south of Italy. A 2018 Cornell genotyping study found that two Italian Calabrese landraces, including "Cavolo Broccolo Ramoso Calabrese," sit genetically close to modern hybrid broccoli, and suggested modern broccoli may have been derived from lines similar to them. Other forms carry their own descriptive names: sprouting broccoli, which produces many small loose florets on slender stalks rather than one big head, and the violet cauliflower types of southern Italy, which genetic studies group with broccoli. Broccoli can also be crossed with its relative Chinese kale (gai lan); plant geneticists use a Chinese kale × broccoli population to map the genes behind broccoli's head. These names are a reminder that "broccoli" is not one fixed thing but a family of closely related cultivated forms.

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Catherine de' Medici and the Journey to France

For centuries broccoli remained largely an Italian specialty. The most often-told account of how it began to travel centres on Catherine de' Medici (Caterina de' Medici), the Florentine noblewoman who in 1533 married the future King Henry II of France. In the popular version she brought Italian cooks and Italian vegetables — broccoli among them — to the French court.

The date of the marriage is firm; the broccoli part is not. The story appears in popular food histories, but no contemporary record tying Catherine to broccoli was found for this article, and the scholarly sources used here do not mention her. The spread of Italian vegetables northward was most likely gradual, carried by many cooks, gardeners and traded seeds. The account is therefore presented here as a traditional story, not as established fact.

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"Italian Asparagus" in England

Broccoli reached Britain somewhat later. According to Stansell and Björkman, various broccoli and cauliflower landraces from southern Italy were introduced to the United Kingdom during the eighteenth century. Popular food histories add that English gardeners called the newcomer "Italian asparagus," and attribute the nickname to the 1724 edition of Philip Miller's gardening dictionary. That wording could not be checked against the dictionary itself for this article, so it is reported here as the commonly told version. The nickname, if accurate, would capture how the vegetable was first understood: a tender spring shoot eaten rather as one might eat asparagus.

Popular histories also describe a cool early reception in France and England, and give the sulfurous smell of broccoli and its cabbage relatives during cooking as one reason. That is a traditional account rather than a documented one; what the genetic and agricultural record does show is that broccoli stayed a minor crop in northern Europe and North America for a long time before it became the everyday staple it is now.

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Crossing the Atlantic: Jefferson and Italian Immigrant Growers

Broccoli's arrival in North America came in two distinct waves: an early, curious, small-scale introduction, and a much later commercial breakthrough that put it on the national table.

The early chapter belongs to Thomas Jefferson, the avid gardener and future president. His own manuscript Garden Book, now held by the Massachusetts Historical Society, records on May 27, 1767: "sowed Lettuce, Radish, Broccoli, & Cauliflower." (The often-repeated version that he sowed it at Monticello that year from Italian seed is not what the entry says: the 1767 entry names no seed source.) Italian seed does appear later — on March 23, 1774 he lists a sowing of "Cavol broccolo Francese di Pisa. Broccoli" among other seeds with Italian names — and broccoli of several kinds ("Roman," "early purple," "white") recurs in the Garden Book in later decades. Jefferson's broccoli was a gentleman-gardener's experiment, however, not the start of a popular crop.

The commercial story is a twentieth-century one, and it was driven by Italian immigration. Stansell and Björkman write that Calabrese broccoli "was initially brought to the United States by immigrants from southern Italy," but "only gained popularity there post-WWII," after improved open-pollinated cultivars such as "Waltham 29" (1950) from the Massachusetts Experiment Station; American and Japanese breeding of hybrids later shifted production to the cooler valleys of the western U.S. coast, allowing year-round production. Popular food histories add a specific founding story: that in 1922 two immigrants from Messina, Sicily, brought broccoli seed to California and made the first plantings near San Jose. No primary or agency record of those plantings was located for this article, so the story is reported here as it is commonly told.

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A Regional Crop Goes Global

The arc of broccoli's history is the story of a bitter coastal weed transformed into a global vegetable. Cole crops were already familiar in Greece by the sixth to fifth centuries BCE; from its Mediterranean cradle and its Italian refinement, broccoli has spread to temperate growing regions around the world, helped along in recent decades by research interest in the health properties of its sulfur compounds.

Modern production has shifted far from the Italian peninsula where the vegetable took shape. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports broccoli together with cauliflower as a single combined category, "cauliflowers and broccoli," so the two cannot be separated in the official figures — a caveat worth keeping in mind with any "broccoli production" statistic. For that combined category, FAOSTAT records world output of about 26.9 million tonnes in 2024, and the two largest producers were China (about 9.9 million tonnes) and India (about 9.8 million tonnes). A vegetable born on the rocky coasts of the Mediterranean and refined in southern Italy is today grown most of all in Asia.

Plant breeders continue the work that began in antiquity. In their 2020 study in Horticulture Research, "From landrace to modern hybrid broccoli," Stansell and Björkman evaluated 109 broccoli or broccoli/cauliflower intermediates for 24 horticultural traits. They found that the quality and harvest index of improved hybrid broccoli had increased with year of cultivar release, but at the cost of a considerable loss of genetic diversity; two landraces were the most likely founding source of modern hybrids, and landraces collected in southern Italy carried 4.8-fold more unique alleles per accession than modern hybrids — a resource for future breeding. The nutritional and medicinal science is covered in the companion Broccoli Benefits articles and on the main Broccoli page; this history is concerned only with how the vegetable came to exist and to spread in the first place.

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Key Research Papers

The list below combines peer-reviewed studies on the domestication of Brassica oleracea with primary historical texts, an agency data source, and food-history and reference sources, plus curated PubMed topic-search links into the botanical and domestication literature. The quotations from Pliny the Elder's Natural History and from De re coquinaria are taken from the English translations given in Maggioni et al. (2018). Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID, or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

1. Mabry ME, Turner-Hissong SD, Gallagher EY, McAlvay AC, An H, Edger PP, et al. The Evolutionary History of Wild, Domesticated, and Feral Brassica oleracea (Brassicaceae). Molecular Biology and Evolution. 2021;38(10):4419-4434. — doi:10.1093/molbev/msab183 · PubMed PMID: 34157722
2. Stansell Z, Björkman T. From landrace to modern hybrid broccoli: the genomic and morphological domestication syndrome within a diverse B. oleracea collection. Horticulture Research. 2020;7:159. — doi:10.1038/s41438-020-00375-0 · PubMed PMID: 33082966
3. Maggioni L, von Bothmer R, Poulsen G, Lipman E. Domestication, diversity and use of Brassica oleracea L., based on ancient Greek and Latin texts. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. 2018;65:137-159. — doi:10.1007/s10722-017-0516-2
4. Cai C, Bucher J, Bakker FT, Bonnema G. Evidence for two domestication lineages supporting a middle-eastern origin for Brassica oleracea crops from diversified kale populations. Horticulture Research. 2022;9:uhac033. — doi:10.1093/hr/uhac033 · PubMed PMID: 35184188
5. Stansell Z, Hyma K, Fresnedo-Ramírez J, Sun Q, Mitchell S, Björkman T, Hua J. Genotyping-by-sequencing of Brassica oleracea vegetables reveals unique phylogenetic patterns, population structure and domestication footprints. Horticulture Research. 2018;5:38. — doi:10.1038/s41438-018-0040-3 · PubMed PMID: 29977574
6. Stansell Z, Farnham M, Björkman T. Complex Horticultural Quality Traits in Broccoli Are Illuminated by Evaluation of the Immortal BolTBDH Mapping Population. Frontiers in Plant Science. 2019;10:1104. — doi:10.3389/fpls.2019.01104 · PubMed PMID: 31620146
7. Jefferson T. Garden Book, 1766-1824 (manuscript; electronic edition, pages 3 and 13). Massachusetts Historical Society, Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. — masshist.org: Garden Book, page 3 (1767) · page 13 (1774)
8. Darwin C. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray; 1859. Chapter 1. — gutenberg.org/ebooks/1228
9. FAOSTAT. Crops and livestock products: "Cauliflowers and broccoli," production quantity, 2024. UN Food and Agriculture Organization. — fao.org/faostat
10. Broccoli. Wikipedia — cultivar classification, breeding origin (sixth century BCE, northern Mediterranean), Calabrese naming, and FAOSTAT production figures. — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli
11. The history of broccoli: from the Etruscans till today. La Cucina Italiana — Pliny the Elder, Apicius, Catherine de' Medici (1533), and the "Italian asparagus" nickname in Miller's Gardeners Dictionary (1724). — lacucinaitaliana.com
12. Thomas Jefferson, the Scientist and Gardener. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello — Jefferson's cultivation of broccoli and other imported vegetables. — monticello.org
13. Brassica oleracea domestication and evolutionary history — PubMed PMID: 34157722
14. Broccoli breeding, landraces, and cultivar history — PubMed: broccoli breeding and landrace history

External Authoritative Resources

1. Wikipedia — Broccoli
2. Monticello — Jefferson the Scientist and Gardener
3. FAOSTAT — Crops and livestock products (UN FAO)

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Connections

• All Food
• Broccoli
• Broccoli Benefits
• Kale
• Cabbage — the same wild ancestor, bred for a tight leafy head instead of flower buds.
• Spinach
• Beets

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