Apiaceae

“Umbelliferae” redirects here. For the flower head that gave the family this name, see Umbel. For the genus of the hogweeds, see Heracleum.

Apiaceae, also called Umbelliferae or the carrot family, is a family of flowering plants in the order Apiales. Its members, the umbellifers, are mostly aromatic herbs, often with hollow stems, and usually with divided leaves whose stalks sheathe the stem at the base. Their flowers are typically borne in compound umbels, and the dry fruit splits into two halves, each with one seed.¹²³ Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants accepts 457 genera and 4,028 species, though other published counts differ widely.⁴ The family grows throughout the world and is most diverse in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.¹

The family both feeds and poisons: a flora of Iraq calls it “of considerable economic importance”, with lethal poisons among its species as well as food plants.⁵ It supplies vegetables such as the carrot, the parsnip and celery, and herbs and spices such as parsley, dill, fennel, coriander, cumin, caraway and anise;² mainland China alone grows some two-fifths of the world’s carrots and turnips.⁶ It also includes poison hemlock, whose alkaloids are nerve poisons,⁷ the water hemlocks, counted among the most poisonous plants of North America and the United Kingdom,⁸ and giant hogweed and wild parsnip, which burn skin that has touched them and is then exposed to sunlight.⁹¹⁰

Silphium, a lost plant of ancient Cyrenaica with a stalk like that of giant fennel, has been identified with several umbellifers, though with none for certain.¹¹¹²¹³ Its juice, according to Pliny, was weighed out against silver. In his day, the first century AD, the plant could no longer be found in Cyrenaica, and a review of 2026 calls its disappearance the first case of man-related plant extinction in written history.¹⁴¹⁵

Taxonomy

Size

Counts of the family differ with the source. The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, in its version of 4 June 2026, accepts 457 genera, two of them hybrid genera, and 4,028 species, 21 of them named hybrids.⁴ On 26 September 2026 Plants of the World Online, Kew’s website that presents the Checklist, gave 456 genera on its family page, and 458 genera and 4,001 species through its search service.¹⁶ Other published estimates run from 2,850 to 3,820 species, and from “more than 200” genera to 466.¹⁷¹¹⁸

The largest genera in the World Checklist are Eryngium (265 species), Ferula (231) and Bupleurum (225); the hogweeds, Heracleum, have 93.⁴ A paper of 2025 nevertheless calls Ferula the largest genus of the family.²¹

Placement

The classification of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, APG IV (2016), places Apiaceae in the order Apiales, in the campanulid clade of the asterids, with Pennantiaceae, Torricelliaceae, Griseliniaceae, Pittosporaceae, Araliaceae and Myodocarpaceae. APG IV numbers its 416 families in a single sequence, and Apiaceae comes last.²² The border with Araliaceae was long blurred: molecular work moved Hydrocotyle from Apiaceae to Araliaceae, and the Mackinlaya group the other way.²²³ Apiaceae are usually herbs without stipules, with a dry fruit of two halves; Araliaceae are usually shrubs and trees with stipules, with a berry-like drupe.²

Subfamilies

Four subfamilies are currently recognised: Apioideae, Saniculoideae, Azorelloideae and Mackinlayoideae, the last two named in 2004.¹⁸²⁴ Apioideae, the largest, has about 400 genera and 3,000 species, among them the carrot, parsley, cumin, coriander and caraway.²⁵²⁶ The old subfamily Hydrocotyloideae has broken up: 40 of its 42 genera were sampled in 2009, and they fell into at least six lineages across Apiaceae and Araliaceae; its type genus, Hydrocotyle, belongs in Araliaceae.²³ A study of 2021, which sequenced 234 genera, upheld the four subfamilies and found Platysace to be the sister of all other Apiaceae.¹⁸

Names

The family has two correct names. Umbelliferae Juss. was published in Genera Plantarum, dated 4 August 1789, and Apiaceae Lindl. in the second edition of Introduction to the Natural System of Botany, dated 13 June 1836. Both are conserved.¹⁶²²

The botanical Code, the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, forms the name of a family from that of one of its genera with the ending -aceae, “but see Art. 18.5”. That article declares nine traditional names, “of long usage”, to be treated as validly published although they are not formed in this way, and Art. 18.6 authorises as alternatives eight names formed from a genus in the regular way, the nomina alternativa.²⁷²²exempt by ancient right The alternative to Umbelliferae is Apiaceae, from Apium, the genus of celery, which is the type of both names; other pairs include Compositae and Asteraceae, Gramineae and Poaceae, and Leguminosae and Fabaceae, an alternative that Leguminosae shares with Papilionaceae.²⁷⁴

In the Code, then, Apiaceae is the alternative; in APG IV, which uses Apiaceae, it is Umbelliferae that appears as the alternative, in parentheses. APG IV, the first list of its series to print them, noted that the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, formally endorses Compositae and Leguminosae but uses Apiaceae, not Umbelliferae.²²

Umbelliferae means “umbel-bearing”, from Latin umbella, “sunshade” or “parasol”, a diminutive of umbra, “shade”, and -fer, from fero, “I bear”.³²⁸²⁹ Apium was the Latin for parsley or celery.²⁸

Description

Umbellifers are mostly aromatic herbs; subshrubs, shrubs and trees are rare, and in New Guinea Mackinlaya is the only genus that forms trees.¹¹⁹ The stems are often hollow between the nodes, where a large pith shrinks as the stem matures.¹⁵ The leaves are usually alternate and compound or deeply divided; the leaf stalk usually sheathes the stem at the base, and stipules are usually absent.¹²

The inflorescence is typically a compound umbel, whose rays each end in a smaller umbel, the umbellet; less often it is a simple umbel, a head, as in Eryngium, or a cyme.¹⁵²⁶ The flowers are usually bisexual and built on a plan of five, with an inferior ovary of two carpels. The bases of the styles are often swollen into a nectar-secreting stylopodium, and the outer flowers of an umbel may be enlarged, or “radiant”.¹⁵

According to the flora of Iraq, the inflorescences are often “polygamous”: the terminal umbel is usually hermaphrodite, or mixed, and the lateral umbels are entirely male, or mixed.⁵ In giant hogweed the terminal umbel usually has only hermaphrodite flowers, and the umbels of the fourth order usually only male ones; see Umbel § Division of labour.³⁰

Umbels that imitate a single flower, called pseudanthia, evolved in subfamily Apioideae at least 36 times, with 46 reversals.²⁶ Many umbellifers with massive displays, such as Ferula, Heracleum and Angelica, are monocarpic perennials: after several seasons of growth they flower once in a lifetime, with tens of thousands of florets. Such displays, the authors of the study write, require lots of resources and are “hardly sustainable”.²⁶

The fruit is a dry schizocarp, sometimes called a cremocarp, from the Greek for “I hang” and “fruit”. It splits into two mericarps, each with one seed and usually five primary ribs, which may be winged, corky or spiny.¹⁵³ At maturity the halves stay attached at the top to a thin, often forked stalk, the carpophore.³¹ Oil tubes, the vittae (Latin for “fillets”), run between and under the ribs and on the inner face; they are common but not universal.³¹⁵³

Umbellifers produce volatile phenylpropanoids, furanocoumarins, sesquiterpene coumarins, polyacetylenes and phthalides, some of them reported from no other family.³² Among the polyacetylenes, those of the falcarinol type are the most widespread; they occur in carrot, celeriac, parsnip and parsley and have antibacterial and antifungal activity;³³³⁴ related, highly neurotoxic compounds characterise the poisonous genera Bupleurum, Cicuta and Oenanthe.³⁵

Useful plants

Crops

Most of the family’s crops came from the Mediterranean region and are now grown throughout the world. Neotropikey names parsley, fennel, dill, coriander, cumin, caraway and anise among the herbs and spices, and carrots, parsnips and celery among the vegetables.²¹⁸ In the Neotropics culantro, Eryngium foetidum, is used as a substitute for coriander.²

Production

FAOSTAT, the statistical database of the Food and Agriculture Organization, has no item for carrots alone. It counts carrots together with turnips, which are not umbellifers, and has no separate items for celery or parsley; its spice item for anise, coriander, cumin, caraway and fennel also takes in star anise and juniper berries.⁶ In 2024, the latest year, the world produced an estimated 45.1 million tonnes of carrots and turnips from 1.27 million hectares, 7.7 times as much as in 1961 and about 3.8 per cent of all primary vegetables.⁶

Production is concentrated in a few countries. Mainland China grew 19.0 million tonnes of carrots and turnips in 2024, 42 per cent of the world total, followed by Uzbekistan with 7.9 per cent and India with 6.1 per cent.⁶ India produced 2.11 million of the 2.67 million tonnes in the spice item, 79 per cent.⁶

The orange carrot

The carrot was probably domesticated in Central Asia, where the wild carrots closest to the cultivated ones come from.³⁶ European breeding began with purple and yellow carrots from the Arab world. Orange carrots probably arose by mutation from yellow ones and then by selection, and are “commonly thought” to have originated in the Netherlands; by the seventeenth century they had displaced the purple forms in Europe and the Mediterranean.³⁷ Accounts differ on the date: Banga traced the modern orange carrot to Dutch breeding of the eighteenth century, the World Carrot Museum to Dutch growers of the sixteenth.³⁷³⁸

The story that the Dutch bred the orange carrot to honour William of Orange is a legend. The World Carrot Museum, run by John Stolarczyk, calls it “probably apocryphal” and says that there is no documentary evidence for it. The same site quotes the historian Simon Schama for a later association: in the eighteenth century, the conspicuous display of orange carrots at market was at one time taken for “a provocative gesture of support” for the exiled House of Orange.³⁸ Carrot has been a colour word in English since the 1670s, first of reddish hair.²⁹

The carrot at war

In the Second World War the British Ministry of Food promoted the carrot. Its “Dig for Victory” campaign used two cartoon mascots, Doctor Carrot and Potato Pete, and according to Stolarczyk the ministry encouraged so much extra growing that by 1942 the country had a surplus of 100,000 tons of carrots.³⁹the plan overfulfilled The Disney cartoonist Hank Porter designed a carrot family of his own, Carroty George, Pop Carrot and Clara Carrot, but the government did not circulate it widely. With sugar rationed at eight ounces per adult a week, carrots sweetened puddings, cakes and marmalade, and went with swedes into a drink called “carrolade”. Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, called it “a food war”, in which every extra row of vegetables in the allotments saved shipping.³⁹

Celery as a luxury

In ancient Greece, wreaths of selinon, wild celery or parsley, crowned the victors at the Isthmian and Nemean games. Such wreaths were also hung on tombs, and a gravely ill person was said to “need selinon”, meaning that he was near death.⁴⁰²⁸ The wild-celery leaf was a punning badge on the coins of Selinus in Sicily.⁴¹

The word celery entered English in the 1660s as “sellery”, from the French céleri, originally sceleri d’Italie.²⁹ In 1699 John Evelyn wrote that “Sellery”, formerly “a stranger with us”, was for its “high and grateful Taste” “ever plac’d in the middle of the Grand Sallet, at our Great Mens Tables, and Praetors Feasts, as the Grace of the whole Board”.⁴² The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an American pressed-glass celery vase dated 1840–50.⁴³

Poisonous plants

Poison hemlock

Poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, owes its toxicity to piperidine alkaloids, chiefly coniine and γ-coniceine, the more toxic of the two and the first to be formed. They occur in all the vegetative organs, the flowers and the fruit, and have a characteristic “mousy” smell.⁷⁴⁴ They are neurotoxins: death comes from respiratory failure, in a way that recalls curare, and chronic intake by pregnant livestock causes malformations of the foetus.⁷ Coniine, which blocks nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, was the first alkaloid to have its structure determined and to be synthesised. Giseke isolated it in 1826, Hofmann established its structure in 1881, and Ladenburg synthesised it in 1886.⁴⁵

The death of Socrates

Socrates died in 399 BC, and Plato describes his death in the Phaedo.⁴⁶⁴⁵ The man who comes “carrying the cup of poison” tells him to walk about until his legs are heavy and then to lie down. When Socrates asks whether he may pour a libation from the cup, the answer is: “We only prepare, Socrates, just so much as we deem enough.” Later the man presses his foot and his legs, which have lost all feeling, “and so upwards and upwards”, until he is cold and stiff. Socrates’ last words concern a debt: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?”⁴⁷ In the Greek of this scene the drug is only to pharmakon, “the drug” or “the poison”, brought already ground; the word for hemlock, kōneion, does not occur in it.⁴⁷

Whether Plato described hemlock poisoning truly is debated. Dayan argued in 2009 that the paralysis rising from the feet is typical of hemlock but the prominent loss of sensation is not, and that Plato, who mentions no bad taste or gastrointestinal effects, may have given a more “noble” account;⁴⁶ in 2024 he concluded that close reading of the Greek resolves many of the discrepancies, and that the death can be accepted as a limited case report of hemlock poisoning.⁴⁸ Hotti and Rischer suggest that the drink may have been a mixture, for example of hemlock and opium.⁴⁵

Hemlock at Athens and Ceos

When Phocion was executed at Athens in 318 BC, the executioner was grinding the hemlock. The drug ran short, and he refused to grind more unless he was paid twelve drachmas, “which was the price of the weight required”; Phocion asked “if a man could not even die at Athens without paying for the privilege”, and had a friend pay.⁴⁹the user pays

Theophrastus records that Thrasyas of Mantineia made a poison for “an easy and painless end” from the juices of hemlock, poppy and other such herbs, in a very small dose. The people of Ceos, he adds, had changed their way of taking hemlock: they now stripped off the husk, bruised it in a mortar, sifted it and drank it sprinkled on water, “and so death is made swift and easy”.⁵⁰ According to Strabo, who cites Menander, an ancient law of Ceos is said to have ordained “that those above sixty years old should be compelled to drink hemlock, in order that there might be sufficient food for the rest”.⁵¹the surplus population

Water hemlocks

The Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture calls water hemlock “the most violently toxic plant that grows in North America”. A small amount poisons livestock or people; its toxin, cicutoxin, acts directly on the central nervous system as a violent convulsant; and the tuberous roots are the most dangerous part.⁵² A clinical review, which counts species of both Cicuta and Oenanthe as water hemlocks, is more guarded, placing them “among the most poisonous plants” of North America and the United Kingdom. Cicutoxin and oenanthotoxin are not alkaloids but C17 polyacetylenes, which block GABA receptors and cause seizures.⁸

Hemlock water-dropwort

Hemlock water-dropwort, Oenanthe crocata, has been called “probably the most poisonous plant in the British Isles”. Its roots are the most toxic part, and are eaten by mistake for other roots.⁵³ A review of 2020 names it and Cicuta virosa as the two most poisonous plants of the British flora, both resembling celery and parsley.⁵⁴

It has been linked with the sardonic grin. Pausanias writes that Sardinia is free from poisons except for one plant: “This deadly herb is like celery, and they say that those who eat it die laughing. Wherefore Homer, and men after him, call unwholesome laughter sardonic.”⁵⁵ Homer’s word is sardanion, used of the “right grim and bitter smile” of Odysseus as he dodges an ox-hoof thrown at him.⁵⁶

In 2009 Appendino and colleagues found that oenanthotoxin and dihydro-oenanthotoxin, isolated from the Sardinian O. fistulosa, potently block GABA-evoked currents. They concluded that there is little doubt that the herba sardonica of ancient medicine is O. crocata, which in the Mediterranean is common only in Sardinia, and that the facial spasm it caused was the risus sardonicus. They also report the ancient account that in pre-Roman Sardinia elderly people who could no longer support themselves were intoxicated with the herb and then thrown from a high rock or beaten to death.⁵⁷ Both the word and the plant are disputed. Liddell and Scott’s lexicon connects Homer’s sardanios perhaps with sesērōs, “grinning”, and notes that the spelling sardonios, after Sardinia, is later; it identifies the Sardinian plant of the ancient explanation as Ranunculus sardous, the Sardinian crowfoot, a buttercup and not an umbellifer.⁴⁰

Phototoxic members

Several umbellifers contain furanocoumarins, compounds that make skin burn in sunlight, a reaction called phytophotodermatitis. Furanocoumarins occur mainly in four unrelated families, Apiaceae, Fabaceae, Moraceae and Rutaceae, and their pathway evolved independently in several of them; the angular furanocoumarins are found mostly in Apiaceae.⁵⁸⁵⁹ Finding one of them, xanthotoxin, toxic to caterpillars, and less so without ultraviolet light, Berenbaum interpreted it as a “biosynthetic escape” from insect herbivores; see also parsnip webworm.⁶⁰

Contact with giant hogweed followed by sunlight can cause blisters and lasting hyperpigmentation in people exposed at work, and in one child it caused a full-thickness burn that needed skin grafting.⁹⁶¹ Wild parsnip, introduced to North America as a root vegetable, now grows wild on prairies and roadsides; its stems and leaves contain furanocoumarins, and contact followed by sunlight causes blistering and then hyperpigmentation.¹⁰

Celery can burn too. In 1983 celery infected with the fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum caused severe phototoxic dermatitis in eleven harvesters.⁶² In 1986 a blistering rash was reported in 30 of 127 workers in the stores of one grocery chain, including all eight produce workers. Contact with celery carried the highest relative risk, 6.3, and the chain’s disease-resistant, high-quality brand of celery had higher levels of furanocoumarins than other brands. A nationwide sample of the chain’s stores found the rash in 13 of 17 states and in 26 per cent of the produce workers surveyed, and the authors suggested that breeding celery for resistance to disease may raise its furanocoumarin content.⁶³the workers paid the premium A year later, in an Oregon study, all 19 cases came from one store, which had held a celery sale that quadrupled the volume of celery sold.⁶⁴ Eating celery can be enough: a woman of 65 was severely burned all over at a tanning salon an hour after eating a large amount of celery root.⁶⁵

Silphium

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Silphium (Greek silphion, Latin laserpicium, its resin laser) grew in Cyrenaica: according to Herodotus, “the country of silphium” reached from the island of Platea to the entrance of the Syrtis.⁶⁶ Theophrastus describes a thick root, a stalk like that of ferula, leaves like celery, which purged sheep, fattened them and made their flesh “wonderfully delicious”, and a broad, leaf-like fruit.¹¹

Monopoly and price

The harvest was regulated. “They have regulations, like those in use in mines, for cutting the root”, Theophrastus wrote, “in accordance with which they fix carefully the proper amount to be cut, having regard to previous cuttings and the supply of the plant. For it is not allowed to cut it wrong nor to cut more than the appointed amount.” The mines rest on one manuscript; the Aldine edition reads “measures”. The plant could not be farmed: “as the land is brought under cultivation and tamed, it retires”.¹¹ The trade was a royal monopoly of the Battiad kings of Cyrene and contributed greatly to the city’s prosperity. Libyans gathered the juice in the steppe, and in Cyrene it was stabilised with wheat flour and exported to Athens.¹³ Koerper and Moerman write that sales at “monopoly prices” greatly helped the cities of Cyrenaica to grow rich.⁴¹ The kings tried to keep the trade to themselves, but some silphium was smuggled to the Carthaginians.¹² Exploitation probably declined from the Hellenistic period, and after Ptolemy Apion’s Libya passed to Rome in 96 BC, Rome was the sole beneficiary.¹³

Soon after coinage was adopted in the sixth century BC, the plant and its seed-vessel appeared on the coins of Cyrene, Barce, Euhesperides and Teuchira;⁴¹ in A. Laronde’s chronology they remained Cyrene’s emblem until the last quarter of the third century BC.¹³ Koerper and Moerman read the exaggerated stalk and the testicle- or heart-like seed pods as deliberate sexual advertising; Amigues finds that at such a degree of stylisation the fruit loses its value as botanical evidence.⁴¹¹³

Pliny says that the juice was weighed out against silver denarii, ad pondus argentei denarii repensum, “sold at the same rate as silver” in Bostock and Riley’s translation; a popular article on the Kew website makes it “worth its weight in gold”.¹⁴⁶⁷ In 93 BC thirty pounds of it were brought to Rome from Cyrene for the state, and at the start of the civil war Caesar, as dictator, took 1,500 pounds of it from the public treasury, along with the gold and silver.¹⁴a reserve currency Amigues dates this to 49 BC.¹³

Disappearance

By Pliny’s time the plant had not been found in Cyrenaica for many years, because the publicani, the tax-farmers who leased the pastures, found it more profitable to graze sheep on them. A single stalk had been found within living memory, and was sent to the emperor Nero.¹⁴the lease outlived the crop The only laser reaching Rome was an inferior kind from Persia, Media or Armenia, often adulterated.¹⁴ Amigues identifies this “Median juice” with asafoetida, Ferula assa-foetida,¹³ whose popular names include Teufelsdreck and “devil’s dung”.⁶⁸

Other ancient writers gave other causes. Strabo says the plant was once nearly lost when barbarians, out of spite, tried to destroy all the roots.⁶⁹ Solinus tells of a raid and then of the inhabitants themselves digging the plants up almost entirely because of the unbearable excess of the tax, ob intolerandam vectigalis nimietatem; but Mommsen, following Salmasius, showed that his passage is mostly borrowed from Pliny’s account of ladanum.⁷⁰

In the late fourth century Oribasius still listed “Cyrenaic juice” among ordinary remedies, though Amigues suggests that by then the name meant a grade of quality rather than an origin. According to her, Synesius of Cyrene admired a silphium plant in his brother’s garden in AD 402 and sent “much silphium juice” among luxurious gifts to Constantinople in 405; Chamoux read this as showing that it had become a rare curiosity kept in gardens.¹³ The Kew article, by contrast, says that the plant was considered extinct by the second century BC.⁶⁷

Modern writers weigh the causes differently. Amigues rejects both the raid and the tax-farmers: by Strabo’s figures the silphium zone covered more than 19,000 km², too much for nomads to clear, and Pliny’s appeal to the greed of the publicani she finds even less convincing. In her view the roots were overexploited, since taking the juice kills the root, as in the harvesting of asafoetida in Persia, and herbivores ate the parts above ground; she doubts whether “extinction” is the right word.¹³ Miski blames overharvesting “driven by short-term profit”, among other factors, but names the plant’s monocarpic habit and extremely slow growth as the likely main reason.¹² Appendino writes that the historical sources blamed “a greedy land management policy”, probably made worse by earlier overexploitation.¹⁵ The Kew article adds Roman overharvesting, desertification, and the possibility that silphium was a sterile hybrid of two giant fennels.⁶⁷

Uses and identity

Silphium was used as a condiment and as a medicine: Pliny counts laser “among the most precious gifts presented to us by Nature” and lists 39 remedies.⁷¹ Koerper and Moerman state that it was widely known to promote contraception and abortion. Appendino finds neither this nor its use as an aphrodisiac supported by the documents from before the extinction: silphium was basically a luxury culinary delicacy, only occasionally a medicine, and later references to abortion may concern asafoetida, whose sources contain the strongly oestrogenic compound ferutinin.⁴¹¹⁵

Which plant silphium was remains unsolved. Proposed candidates include Ferula tingitana, F. communis, Thapsia garganica and Cachrys ferulacea.¹² Amigues concluded that Margotia gummifera is the living species closest to silphium, but not that it is silphium, and that archaeobotany is needed; Appendino likewise finds it the closest living relative on morphological fit, as the German botanist Link suggested in the early nineteenth century.¹³¹⁵ Three genera of the family, Laserpitium, Laser and Silphiodaucus, carry the lost plant’s names.¹⁶

The Ferula drudeana hypothesis

In 2021 Mahmut Miski proposed that silphium survives in Anatolia as Ferula drudeana. Walter Siehe first collected it in 1909, in Adana province, and Korovin published it in 1947 without having seen it in the field. Miski found it in 1983 near Hasan Dağı in Cappadocia, and it was found again at Siehe’s site in 2004. Its small populations, at three places, are all associated with former Greek villages, often in protected enclaves such as stone-walled orchards.¹² Miski points to the rare opposite arrangement of its flowering branches, as on the coins; to its papery, leaf-like half-fruits, like Theophrastus’ broad fruit; to a pleasant-smelling gum-resin; and to stalks that shoot up after heavy spring rain. He supposes that smugglers carried the seed to Anatolia in antiquity, but accepts that the identity cannot be confirmed until the plant is compared with an archaeological sample of silphium.¹² Later papers from his group call it “the putative Anatolian ecotype” of silphion.⁷²²¹

The archaeobotanist Erica Rowan, quoted by National Geographic, found the reasoning plausible. The historian of ancient medical plants Alain Touwaide questioned the argument that the plant is Greek because Greeks once lived there, and thought that matching its compounds to silphium’s prescribed uses would be a stronger test.⁷³ Appendino’s review speaks of an “alleged rediscovery in a remote Anatolian area”.¹⁵ Miski himself has warned that publications promoting Anatolian Ferula roots as an aphrodisiac, including for erectile dysfunction, risk their unchecked short-term commercial exploitation; a large population of F. elaeochytris on Mount Cassius (Kel Dağı), he reported, had already been destroyed.¹²first as tragedy, then as farce

See also

• Umbel
• Heracleum
• Giant hogweed
• Common hogweed
• Sosnowsky’s hogweed
• Persian hogweed
• Furanocoumarin
• Phytophotodermatitis
• Parsnip webworm
• Monocarpy