PARSNIP 227 



PARSNIP (Pastinaca Sativa) 



In Plate XXXIV. we have a drawing of the Parsnip — 

 a plant that many persons would at once associate in 

 their minds with the kitchen garden, but which is, 

 nevertheless, a true wildling— and the source from whence 

 the cultivated parsnip was derived. In the wild plant 

 the root is small, hard, and stringy, and not at all open 

 to the amenities of the culinary art, though on gathering 

 it we find it having in form and odour a suggestive 

 resemblance to the parsnips of the gardener. In the 

 garden we have seen roots dug up of eighteen inches 

 circumference round the crown and two feet long. The 

 wild parsnip is found freely enough in many parts of 

 the country, on the banks, edges of fields, or waste ground, 

 but has a distinct preference for a chalky or gravelly 

 soil. The plant we figure we gathered in a quite ideal 

 situation for it — a wild, open, breezy downland country, 

 with the blue sea for our horizon, and immediately in 

 front of us a great chalk pit gleaming in almost dazzling 

 whiteness in the sunshine, and its floor a mass of debris 

 overgrown with grass and wild thyme and great patches of 

 the yellow blossoms of the parsnip. 



Its blossoms are seen when examined singly to be 

 very small, but, being massed together into heads, con- 

 tributing their share in the general floral display. As will 

 be seen from our illustration, they are yellow in colour, 

 and are borne in clusters of some eight or [ten rays to 

 the general flower-head. This arrangement is known as 

 umbellate, and these umbel-bearing flowers form -a very 

 large natural order, the Umbellifera, that includes many 



