Parsley: History and Traditional Use
Parsley is the herb everybody recognises and almost nobody thinks about. Yet the small green sprig on the edge of the plate has one of the strangest biographies in the garden. In ancient Greece it crowned athletes and was strewn on graves, and a Greek who was very ill was said to "need only parsley." Charlemagne ordered it planted on every imperial estate; English gardeners swore its seed went down to the Devil and back before it would sprout. In the nineteenth century its seed oil yielded a drug, apiol, that was sold for decades as a menstrual remedy and quietly used as an abortifacient, until a run of poisonings in the twentieth century ended that chapter. This article follows Petroselinum crispum from the rocky hillsides of the Mediterranean to the tabbouleh bowl and the modern laboratory. Where the record is firm we say so; where a story is tradition or folklore, we call it that.
Table of Contents
- Origins, Botany and a Name That Means "Rock Celery"
- Greece: Crowns for Victors, Wreaths for the Dead
- Rome and Pliny: Parsley Comes to the Table
- Charlemagne's Gardens, Gerard and Culpeper
- Folklore: Seed That Goes to the Devil and Back
- Three Parsleys and the Kitchen: Curly, Flat-Leaf, Hamburg Root
- Apiol: The Dark Chapter of Parsley Chemistry
- Commission E and Modern Research
- Parsley Today
- Key Research Papers
- Connections
- Featured Videos
Origins, Botany and a Name That Means "Rock Celery"
Parsley, Petroselinum crispum, is a biennial of the carrot family, the Apiaceae: it spends its first year making a rosette of leaves and a taproot, and its second year sending up a flowering stalk of small yellow-green umbels before it sets seed and dies. Its close relatives are the plants it is most often confused with in old texts: celery (Apium graveolens), lovage, and the poisonous look-alike fool's parsley (Aethusa cynapium), a garden weed with similar leaves and an unpleasant smell when bruised.
The plant's wild home is the central and eastern Mediterranean. Linnaeus, in the eighteenth century, named Sardinia as its native habitat, and modern floras list it as native to Greece, the Balkans and the North African coast of Algeria and Morocco; the tidy claim that it was "first cultivated in Sardinia around the third century BC" is repeated in many sources but rests on thin evidence, and the honest statement is that parsley was in cultivation somewhere in the Greek and Italian world by the classical period. It is now naturalised across temperate Europe, including Britain, where it is reported to have been first cultivated in 1548, although the Old English word for it shows the plant was known in Anglo-Saxon England centuries earlier.
The name tells its own story. The Greek petroselinon is built from petra, rock, and selinon, the Greek word for celery and its relatives — a word so old that it is attested in Mycenaean Greek Linear B tablets as se-ri-no, more than three thousand years ago. Greek and Roman writers distinguished several selinon plants by where they grew: marsh celery (heleioselinon), mountain celery (oreoselinon) and the "rock celery", petroselinon, that clung to stony hillsides. Pliny the Elder devotes separate chapters of his Natural History to each. Latin took the word over as petroselinum, medieval Latin wore it down to petrosilium, and from there it entered Old English as petersilie (still the German word today) and Old French as peresil. Middle English fused the two into forms like persely, and by the late fourteenth century the word had settled into parsley.
One consequence of that shared root matters for everything that follows: in a Greek or Latin text, selinon or apium can mean parsley or celery, and translators have chosen differently for centuries. Wherever an ancient author is quoted below as saying "parsley", it is worth remembering that a wild celery may have been in his mind.
Greece: Crowns for Victors, Wreaths for the Dead
Parsley enters written history in Homer, and it enters as scenery. In the Odyssey, the cave of the nymph Calypso is ringed by four springs and "soft meadows of violets and parsley", in A. T. Murray's translation; in the Iliad, while Achilles sulks, the horses of his Myrmidons stand idle by their chariots "eating lotus and parsley of the marsh". That selinon of the marsh is almost certainly wild celery rather than the garden herb, but the passages show the plant family was already a familiar part of the Greek landscape in the eighth century BC.
The Greeks then did something remarkable with it: they made the same plant the emblem of triumph and the emblem of death. Of the four great athletic festivals, the Olympic crown was wild olive and the Delphic crown was bay; the Nemean Games crowned their victors with selinon, and so, in early times, did the Isthmian Games at Corinth. Pausanias, the second-century AD traveller, is explicit: "At the Isthmus the pine, and at Nemea celery became the prize to commemorate the sufferings of Palaemon and Archemorus." Plutarch, writing of the Corinthian general Timoleon in the fourth century BC, adds the dating: parsley "was still used for wreaths at the Isthmian, as it is now at the Nemean games, and it was not long ago that the pine came into use instead." Whether that crown was parsley or wild celery is, again, a matter on which translators and botanists disagree; the Greek word is the same.
Archemorus is the key to the other half of the story. The Nemean Games were said to have been founded as funeral games for Opheltes, the infant son of a local king, who was set down in a meadow by his nurse and killed by a serpent while she guided the Seven against Thebes to a spring. The seers renamed the child Archemorus, "the beginning of doom". Pausanias saw his grave at Nemea, fenced with stones and surrounded by altars, and the cypress grove where the child was said to have been left in the grass. A crown that commemorated a dead child was, inevitably, a plant of mourning too. Plutarch tells how Timoleon's soldiers, marching to battle in Sicily, met mules laden with parsley and took it as a bad omen "because we are generally accustomed to wreath the tombs of the dead with parsley; and this has given rise to a proverb, namely, that one who is dangerously sick 'needs only parsley.'"
The funeral association was strong enough to keep parsley off some Greek tables altogether. Pliny reports that the Greek writers Chrysippus and Dionysius held it "nothing less than sacrilege" to eat parsley, "seeing that parsley is consecrated to the funereal feasts in honour of the dead". None of this is medicine; it is the texture of a plant that had become sacred, and it explains why the Greeks, who knew parsley intimately, largely kept it out of the kitchen.
Rome and Pliny: Parsley Comes to the Table
It was the Romans who turned parsley into food. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History in the 70s AD, opens his chapter on apium with a scene from the Italian countryside: parsley "is held in universal esteem; for we find sprigs of it swimming in the draughts of milk given us to drink in country-places; and we know that as a seasoning for sauces, it is looked upon with peculiar favour." He then lists seventeen remedies for it before turning, with evident amusement, to the Greek quarrel about whether it should be eaten at all. He also gives the rock parsley, petroselinon, a chapter of its own, recommending its juice for abscesses, and describes the mountain and marsh kinds as promoting urine and the menses — the first appearance in the record of the two uses that would define parsley for the next two thousand years.
Dioscorides, the Greek army physician whose De Materia Medica (first century AD) became the foundation of European pharmacy, is reported to have valued the selinon plants for complaints of the kidney and bladder and as a menstrual stimulant, and to have drawn the same marsh-versus-mountain distinction that Pliny repeats. These are traditional indications, recorded as what the ancient authorities said, not as evidence that the herb works. What is certain is that the Roman garden and table carried parsley north, and that by the time the Western empire dissolved the herb was established wherever Romans had cooked.
Charlemagne's Gardens, Gerard and Culpeper
The clearest early-medieval evidence for parsley is a royal instruction. The Capitulare de villis, a Frankish ordinance on the management of the crown estates issued in Charlemagne's name around the year 800 (the exact date, and whether his son Louis the Pious had a hand in it, are disputed), ends with a famous list of some seventy plants that every estate garden was to grow. Among them, between olisatum (alexanders) and apium (celery), stands petresilinum: parsley. The document does not say what it was for, but its placement beside celery, lovage and dill suggests it was already, first and foremost, a pot-herb.
The great Renaissance herbals gave the plant its formal medical reputation. John Gerard's Herball of 1597 treats "Parsele" as an everyday plant, "delightful to the taste and agreeable to the stomache", and repeats the old belief that the roots or seeds boiled in ale would "cast foorth strong venome or poyson", adding that "the seed is the strongest part of the herbe" — a judgement chemistry would later confirm for reasons Gerard could not have guessed. Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653) placed parsley under the dominion of Mercury and set out the uses that would persist in household medicine into the twentieth century: it "helps to provoke urine and women's courses, to break wind both in the stomach and bowels"; the root "opens obstructions both of liver and spleen, and is therefore accounted one of the five opening roots"; the seed "is effectual to provoke urine and women's courses, to expel wind, to break the stone".
Read together, the two herbals show parsley in its long medieval and early-modern role: a diuretic (a substance that increases urine flow) for "gravel" and stone, a carminative (a remedy for wind), an "opener" of the liver, and an emmenagogue (a substance that brings on menstruation). That last use, phrased delicately as provoking "women's courses", is the thread that leads directly to the darkest part of parsley's modern history.
Folklore: Seed That Goes to the Devil and Back
Anyone who has sown parsley knows the problem: the seed can take a month or more to come up, and sometimes never does. Modern horticulture blames furanocoumarins in the seed coat, natural germination inhibitors that must be leached away by moisture. Older gardeners had a better story. English lore held that parsley seed had to go down to the Devil and back before it would sprout — the number of trips varying by county and teller, six, seven or nine. German tradition has the same tale: Petersilie geht siebenmal zum Teufel, parsley goes seven times to the Devil.
Around that central myth clustered a whole calendar of rules. The safe day to sow was Good Friday, when the Devil had no power over the soil. Parsley should not be transplanted ("transplant parsley, transplant sorrow") and should never be given away as a plant, because it carried death into the receiving household — a direct descendant, whether the gardeners knew it or not, of the Greek funeral wreath. It was said to flourish only where the woman of the house "wore the trousers", and a German rhyme states the plant's reproductive reputation outright: parsley helps a man onto his horse, and a woman under the earth. These are folklore, offered as social history, and they show that ordinary people carried the double image of parsley — life and death, kitchen and grave — from antiquity into living memory.
Three Parsleys and the Kitchen: Curly, Flat-Leaf, Hamburg Root
Cultivation produced three distinct parsleys. Flat-leaf ("Italian") parsley is the older type and closest to the wild plant, with broad, serrated leaves and the strongest flavour; it is the parsley of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Curly-leaf parsley, with tightly ruffled leaves, is a later selection whose decorative frill made it the universal garnish of the Anglo-American plate; it is milder and slightly more bitter. The third kind is a root crop. Hamburg or turnip-rooted parsley (Petroselinum crispum Radicosum Group) is bred for a pale, parsnip-like taproot eaten as a winter vegetable in Central and Eastern Europe. Neither the ancients nor the medieval herbals mention it. Its arrival in England is unusually well dated: the gardener Philip Miller wrote in his Gardeners' Dictionary that the large-rooted parsley "was many years cultivated in Holland before the English gardeners could be prevailed upon to sow it", that he had "brought the seeds of it from thence in 1727", and that he grew it for several years before it was known in the London markets.
In northern and western Europe it became a flavouring and a garnish: the sprig on the plate, the handful in the stock pot, the base of the French persillade and the Italian gremolata. In the Levant it remained what it had been on the Mediterranean hillside — a green vegetable eaten by the bowlful. Tabbouleh, the salad of the mountains of Lebanon and Syria, is in its traditional form mostly parsley: finely chopped flat-leaf parsley with mint, tomato and onion, dressed with lemon and olive oil, with only a modest amount of soaked bulgur wheat. Western versions reverse the proportions. The distinction matters nutritionally: it is the Levantine habit of eating parsley by the handful, not the garnish, that delivers the vitamin K, vitamin C, folate and apigenin for which the herb is now studied.
Apiol: The Dark Chapter of Parsley Chemistry
The scientific history of parsley is really the history of one molecule. Parsley seed (botanically the fruit) carries far more essential oil than the leaf, and the oil is dominated by two related compounds of the phenylpropene family: apiol and myristicin, the latter the same compound that gives nutmeg its narcotic reputation. Which predominates depends on the variety. The drug's medical career began in mid-nineteenth-century France, when two physicians, Joret and Homolle, prepared apiol from the seed and reported it as a remedy for intermittent fever (malaria) and for amenorrhoea, the absence of menstruation; sources date their work to 1849 or 1855. By the late nineteenth century apiol capsules were sold across Europe and North America as an emmenagogue, a remedy to "bring on" a delayed period.
Everyone in the trade understood what "bringing on a delayed period" often meant. Apiol, like pennyroyal and rue, was the respectable face of the abortifacient: sold as a menstrual regulator, taken in large doses by women who were pregnant and did not wish to be. The reckoning came in the twentieth century. In the early 1930s a wave of paralysis among women in Europe who had taken apiol capsules was traced, in at least a large part, to adulteration of the product with tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate, an industrial organophosphate — the same chemical responsible for the "Jamaica ginger" paralysis that had crippled thousands of Americans in 1930. Case reports through the 1940s and 1950s then documented that apiol alone, unadulterated, could kill: a French report of 1947 described flaccid quadriplegia from "probably apiolic" polyneuritis two weeks after an illegal abortion; the Lancet in 1956 reported a death from apiol used as an abortifacient; Canadian physicians in 1958 described fatal haemolytic anaemia, kidney failure and hepatitis after a proprietary apiol compound.
A survey of calls to the Montevideo poison centre between 1986 and 1999 found parsley among the plants most often used in attempted herbal abortion, and it recorded deaths where parsley was taken with rue. Modern toxicology has added a further reason for caution: apiol and myristicin belong to the same alkenylbenzene family as safrole and estragole, compounds that form DNA-damaging metabolites in animal liver, and a 2016 risk assessment modelled apiol's hazard by read-across from safrole. The practical modern conclusion is the one the pharmacists of 1930 learned the hard way — the leaf on the plate is safe in any culinary quantity, and the concentrated seed and seed oil are a drug, contraindicated in pregnancy and in kidney disease.
Commission E and Modern Research
When Germany's Commission E — the expert panel that between 1978 and 1994 reviewed the traditional herbal drugs on the German market — came to parsley, it split the plant exactly along the historical fault line. Parsley herb and parsley root received a positive (approved) monograph, for irrigation therapy of the lower urinary tract and for the prevention of kidney gravel, with the standard caution against use in pregnancy and in kidney inflammation. Parsley seed received a negative monograph: its apiol and myristicin content, its documented toxicity and its abortifacient history outweighed any benefit for which evidence existed.
The diuretic tradition itself was finally put to a laboratory test in 2002, when Sawsan Kreydiyyeh and Julnar Usta at the American University of Beirut gave rats an aqueous extract of parsley seed to drink and measured their urine. The animals passed significantly more urine than on water, and perfusion experiments on the isolated kidney showed the mechanism: the extract inhibited the sodium-potassium pump (the Na/K-ATPase enzyme) in the kidney tubules, leaving more potassium and sodium in the urine and drawing water after them. It is a small animal study using the seed, not the leaf; but it is the first demonstration that the "provoke urine" of two thousand years of herbals describes a real, measurable effect with a plausible mechanism.
The other modern thread is apigenin. Parsley leaf is one of the richest dietary sources of this flavone (a class of plant polyphenol), which it stores mainly as the glycoside apiin. A Danish crossover trial in 1999 fed fourteen volunteers a controlled diet with and without parsley and found that apigenin appeared in their urine only during the parsley week, alongside a rise in two red-cell antioxidant enzymes; a German study in 2006 traced the time course, with plasma apigenin peaking about seven hours after a parsley meal and only a fraction of a percent of the dose appearing in the urine. Reviews of parsley's ethnopharmacology in 2013 and 2024 catalogue dozens of laboratory findings for its extracts and are candid that almost none has been carried into a controlled human trial. The evidence for the leaf, in short, is that of a nutrient-dense green vegetable with an unusually well-absorbed flavone; the evidence for parsley as a medicine remains mostly preclinical.
Parsley Today
Parsley is now one of the most widely used culinary herbs in the world — dried and bottled in the north, sold in vast fresh bunches in every Middle Eastern and Mediterranean market. Its two ancient personalities survive intact: the Levant still eats it as a vegetable, the Anglo-American plate still uses it as a decoration and a breath-freshener, and the root form remains a winter staple of Central European soup.
What has changed is that the herb's double nature is now understood chemically rather than mythically. The Greeks made one plant serve for the victor's crown and the grave; modern pharmacology makes the same division between the leaf, a safe and genuinely nutritious food, and the seed and its oil, a source of compounds that were once sold as medicine and are now handled as toxins. A reader who wants the benefit of parsley's long tradition can take it the way the mountain villages of Lebanon always have — a bowl of tabbouleh that is eighty percent parsley — and leave the seed extracts, as the Commission E did, to history.
Key Research Papers
The list combines the modern reviews of parsley's ethnobotany and pharmacology, the landmark diuretic and apigenin studies, and the mid-twentieth-century case reports that closed the apiol chapter. Historical primary texts — Homer, Pliny, Pausanias, Plutarch, the Capitulare de villis, Gerard and Culpeper — are named in the article rather than cited here.
- Kreydiyyeh SI, Usta J (2002). Diuretic effect and mechanism of action of parsley. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 11849841
- Farzaei MH, Abbasabadi Z, Ardekani MR, Rahimi R, Farzaei F (2013). Parsley: a review of ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry and biological activities. Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine. — PubMed PMID: 24660617
- Bahramsoltani R, Ahmadian R, Daglia M, Rahimi R (2024). Petroselinum crispum (Mill.) Fuss (Parsley): An Updated Review of the Traditional Uses, Phytochemistry, and Pharmacology. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. — doi:10.1021/acs.jafc.3c06429
- Alobaidi S (2024). Renal health benefits and therapeutic effects of parsley (Petroselinum crispum): a review. Frontiers in Medicine. — PubMed PMID: 39735703
- Nielsen SE, Young JF, Daneshvar B, Lauridsen ST, Knuthsen P, Sandström B, Dragsted LO (1999). Effect of parsley (Petroselinum crispum) intake on urinary apigenin excretion, blood antioxidant enzymes and biomarkers for oxidative stress in human subjects. The British Journal of Nutrition. — PubMed PMID: 10615220
- Meyer H, Bolarinwa A, Wolfram G, Linseisen J (2006). Bioavailability of apigenin from apiin-rich parsley in humans. Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism. — PubMed PMID: 16407641
- Hermann K, Le Roux A, Fiddes FS (1956). Death from apiol used as abortifacient. Lancet. — PubMed PMID: 13320936
- Quinn LJ, Harris C, Joron GE (1958). Apiol Poisoning. Canadian Medical Association Journal. — PubMed PMID: 20325694
- Ciganda C, Laborde A (2003). Herbal infusions used for induced abortion. Journal of Toxicology. Clinical Toxicology. — PubMed PMID: 12807304
- Alajlouni AM, Al Malahmeh AJ, Kiwamoto R, Wesseling S, Soffers AE, Al-Subeihi AA, Vervoort J, Rietjens IM (2016). Mode of action based risk assessment of the botanical food-borne alkenylbenzene apiol from parsley using physiologically based kinetic (PBK) modelling and read-across from safrole. Food and Chemical Toxicology. — PubMed PMID: 26826679
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