52 THE BOOK OF ASPARAGUS 







It is not, however, because of their nourishing value that 

 these vegetables are so important, but because of their 

 mineral salts and agreeable flavours, the value of which 

 cannot be over-estimated on physical as on aesthetic 

 grounds. Moreover, in a cooked state, celery, asparagus, 

 seakale, scorzonera, and salsify are all extremely easy and 

 quick of digestion, even though they do not possess quite 

 so many virtues as some old writers have thought, from 

 Anthony Mizold, who, thirteen hundred years ago recom- 

 mended asparagus as a certain cure for toothache, down 

 to quite recent editions of the British Pharmacopeia. 



Of the plants just named, the asparagus makes the 

 strongest appeal to our sense of the beautiful. This is 

 what we should expect from its botanical relationship, 

 for it belongs to the order of beautiful plants known as 

 Liliaceae, to which belong also our lilies, scillas, tulips, 

 and fritillaries. The garden asparagus (A. officinalis) is, 

 as everyone knows, a herbaceous plant with tiny scaly 

 leaves, from the axils of which proceed bunches of little 

 needles usually and erroneously spoken of as leaves. 

 It bears small bell-shaped flowers containing honey. 

 These flowers are uni-sexual, male and female flowers 

 occurring on different plants. The male flowers, how- 

 ever, contain a rudimentary pistil, and the female flowers 

 rudimentary stamens. The honey, which is secreted at 

 the base of the petals, is accessible to bees ; for whose 

 benefit, also, the pleasant scent of the asparagus flowers 

 is produced. 



Seakale, celery, and salsify, like asparagus, occur 

 wild in England ; and seakale has never until lately 

 succeeded in extending its popularity as a vegetable 

 much beyond these isles. Scorzonera is the only one 

 of the plants under discussion which is never found wild 

 in this country. It is a Spanish plant belonging, like 

 salsify, to the order Composite, and resembling salsify 

 much in its habit, size, and flavour, but differing in the 



