substitute, if one can afford it. In contrast to the pea, cabbage 
and lettuce, cultivated asparagus is readily identifiable with its 
wild ancestor, a plant that to-day covers the waste steppes of 
south Russia by the billions and furnishes food for browsing 
herds of horses and cattle. Although grown for over 2000 years 
as a vegetable, there is very little distinction between the 
most modern “improved” varieties and those from these wild 
pasture lands. This lack of variation may be accounted for in 
part by the method of propagating it, this usually being accom- 
plished by dividing up the old plant, instead of growing it each 
time from seed. 
Often associated in the dinner courses with the heavy vege- 
tables such as asparagus, peas and potatoes, are greens and but- 
tered beets. As for greens, they seem to have been in vogue from 
time immemorial, and to have consisted of almost anything ten- 
der, green and eatable. The chards are beets with slender roots, 
and thick mid-ribbed leaves, which together with the common red 
beet and the sugar beet, trace their ancestry back to the common 
wild beet of Europe and Asia, Beta vulgaris. Both the red 
beet and the sugar beet contain large percentages of sugar. The 
dandelion is mentioned by Omar Khayyam as “that green herb” 
and probably originally migrated from Asia. Its use as food is 
said to be comparatively modern, we having learned to like it 
from its association with us as a medicinal herb. The chicories 
are still very wild looking, and show but little effect from their so- 
journ with man Although widely distributed over the world as 
a weed, their native country appears to be the continents of Asia 
and Europe, especially the southern and central portions. The 
two cresses, the garden and the water, have come to us as vege- 
tables through their association with us as medicinal herbs. The 
same is true of celery, the ancestor of which abounds as a poison- 
ous water-loving plant in England and other parts of Europe 
along brooks and drainage ditches. One of the old English her- 
balists some 400 years ago wrote “This is not woonted to be eaten, 
neither is it counted good for sauce.” The case of the medicinal 
herb known as rhubarb was different, as it is now a common 
sauce in America. At one time the leaves of this plant, which 
differ but little from its wild Volga ancestor, Rheum Rhaponticum 
were used as greens and considered superior for that purpose to 
spinach and beets. 
Turnips, carrots, parsnips and radishes trace their ancestry 
back to a very weedy, “seedy” lot of forbears, which many of 
them tend to resemble even now, when growing conditions are 
not of the best, as is the case with some of my neighbor’s radishes. 
Long, stringy, woody, wiry roots about an eighth of an inch in 
diameter with very large healthy tops, are w T hat his arduous labor 
in amateur gardening have brought him. So that upwards of 
3000 years of cultivation have not done much for this vegetable. 
On the Great Pyramid of Egypt, there is said to be an inscription 
