LXXXIX 
CELERY IS A BUILT-UP PLANT 
I SN’T IT ODD that man can take advantage of the 
natural peculiarities of plants, develop those unusual 
qualities, and profit hugely by doing so! 
There is celery, for instance. It is a built-up plant. 
Its roots are of little importance. Its leaves do not 
flaunt themselves very proudly. It has almost no stalk 
at all. The bulk of the plant as we know it is made up 
of none of the elements that are usually considered im¬ 
portant. That part of the celery plant that in most other 
vegetables is quite insignificant, the mere leaf stems, has 
been so greatly developed that it has become almost the 
whole plant. 
The celery plant was not always what it is today. It 
is, in fact, a member of the parsley family and a cousin 
to the carrot. It began by having leaf stems that were 
larger than the others of its kind, and man began to eat 
them. He started planting celery in his garden and 
breeding it always for larger and more tender leaf stems. 
Rhubarb is another plant that has been treated in a simi¬ 
lar way. It, too, had a big leaf stem. It is not a relative 
to celery, however, as it is a member of the buckwheat 
family, but it has been developed by man along similar 
lines. 
Man cultivated celery in home gardens for centuries, 
all the time developing the leaf stems. He did not awake 
to the fact that it could be grown and marketed on a 
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