Apiaceae
Apium graveolens
Celery · Wild celery · Celeriac
- Part used
- seedrootaerial
- Native range
- Europe, western Asia and north Africa, in wet and saline ground
- Morphology
- A biennial of marshy ground to about a metre with glossy divided leaves and umbels of tiny greenish-white flowers. Wild celery is bitter and stringy; the vegetable is a heavily selected cultivar.
What is in it
Evidence
Very little controlled human evidence. 3-n-butylphthalide has been developed as a stroke drug in China, which is a finding about an isolated compound.
Safety
A significant food allergen, and one of the fourteen allergens requiring declaration under EU food law — celery anaphylaxis is well documented and is more common in central Europe. Furanocoumarins cause phytophotodermatitis, an occupational problem for celery harvesters. Seed preparations may lower blood pressure. Avoided in pregnancy at medicinal doses.
Interactions: Additive with antihypertensives and diuretics; Additive photosensitivity
Regulatory: Permitted as a food; a declarable allergen in the EU. Permitted as a listed ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Used as a medicine long before it was a vegetable — worn as garlands in ancient Greece and used for gout and urinary complaints. Celery seed remains a standard Western herbal preparation for arthritic conditions.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Celery is a declarable allergen in European food law alongside peanuts and shellfish, which surprises most people outside central Europe, where celery anaphylaxis is genuinely common. The cross-reactivity runs through the Apiaceae — carrot, parsley, coriander, fennel — and with birch pollen.
Its phototoxicity is an occupational disease. Harvesters handling celery infected with pink rot develop severe blistering burns on sun exposure, because the fungal infection causes the plant to produce far more furanocoumarins in response. A stressed plant is chemically different from a healthy one, which is a general principle worth carrying: the "wild is stronger" argument is sometimes true, and it is true because the plant is defending itself.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.