Plant Story--Ancient Asparagus, Asparagus officinalis

Asparagus is an odd vegetable. We eat just the new shoots. Not leaves, not roots, not fruit.
It is also an old vegetable, eaten in the European tradition since at least Roman times.

Because it is such an old and widely-known vegetable, there is a lot of available information about it, not all of which I can verify.

The commercially grown and traded asparagus is garden asparagus, Asparagus officinalis in the asparagus family, Asparagaceae. The asparaguses are native to Eurasia so in North America that is pretty much the only asparagus. It is found growing wild in all 48 states, having escaped from cultivation. But it is not very weedy.

Worldwide, there are 170 to 305 other species in the genus Asparagus. (That range of numbers means someone needs to study it seriously to figure out, for example, how many of those are the same plant with two names.) As a group, the asparaguses are very diverse, including shrubs and vines. Chinese asparagus (Asparagus cochinchinensis, previously A. lucidus) is, as the name suggests, native to China, where it has been a medicinal plant, and to a lesser degree food plant, since ancient times. Today China is one of the top producers of garden asparagus but garden asparagus does not have a long history there. The asparagus of Ayurvedic medicine is a third species. shatavari, A. racemosus.

big asparagus plant

Garden asparagus is a perennial herb. The shoots we eat, when allowed to mature, form stalks with feathery leaf-like structures that are really stems, technically called cladodes. Its flowers are little pale yellow bells. The ripe fruits are small red balls, considered poisonous. The plant is dioecious with "male" and female" plants so two plants of different sexes are needed to produce fruit on the females.

asparagus flowers

Garden asparagus is native to shrubby communities at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.  It is reportedly shown in an Egyptian frieze that is 5,000 years old and identified in food remnants in Saqqara. I cannot find details of which frieze or where and when in Saqqara. Other sources are doubtful. Egyptians and others in the area gathered many new spring shoots, and the word that became "asparagus" was not then restricted to the vegetable we eat today. Furthermore, a relative, stone sperage, Aspargus acutifolius, was gathered and eaten in the same way. Apparently garden asparagus is better than stone sperage and became the domesticated plant. Given that garden asparagus is native in or near Egypt, it seems likely ancient Egyptians at least gathered and ate it but I cannot find satisfactory supporting information.

Certainly the Greeks and Romans ate it. Early Greeks gathered it, but the Romans grew garden asparagus:  in On Farming, Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE) described how to grow it (Cato the Elder online, see 161 link). Caesar Augustus reportedly arranged for import of aspargus for his table as it came into season, from all around the Empire. The 4th or 5th century cookbook by Apicius, containing recipes for upperclass Roman meals, includes a recipe for asparagus (Apicius online, under vegetables link).

young asparagus plant

Asparagus reached northern Europe and England with the Roman legions and was brought to America by early colonists but was not widely eaten until the 19th and 20th centuries when canning made it much more available. Before that, it was either eaten fresh early in the spring or dried.

Sources say both that it fell out of favor between the Romans and the modern era and also that it was grown in large quantities in Italy in the 1400s. Which sounds like: in some places people gave up on it and in other places it continued to be a popular food.

Our name, asparagus, is based on the Greek name sperage, which was applied to a variety of edible shoots. In England, that name didn't make any particular sense, coming to them as sperage or asparagus, so they turned the name into sparrow grass. It has also been called coralwort for the red fruits (wort is an old word meaning plant).

asparagus spears

Asparagus has probably always been a food mainly for the elite since it is labor intensive to harvest and is only harvested for a few weeks a year. Poor people would likely harvest a meal and then go on to other foods. It is remarkable in being one of our few perennial vegetables and the roots will produce shoots for at least ten years, so gathering semi-wild asparagus every spring would fit into foraging for wild vegetables. There is still a distinct "asparagus season" when good quality fresh asparagus is available at reasonable prices, while the rest of the year it is more expensive and, if fresh, shipped long distances.

White asparagus is the same plant as green asparagus, it is simply protected from sunlight so chlorophyll, which produces the green color, does not form. That is particularly labor-intensive to produce but likely goes back to the Romans. It was certainly known 300 years ago:  see 1696 painting by Adriaen Coorte link. Other colors of asparagus are produced by different varieties.

From the earliest Greek records, garden asparagus and its wild relatives were used as medicines. 

The Greeks used it for toothache and bee stings. Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army, recommended it for dysentery, "griefs" of the kidneys and dislocations as well. The Tacunium Sanitatis, a health manual of 13th and 14th century Europe, said it opened the humors and stimulated carnal relations. Gerard, in 1633, noted it was a mild diuretic, good for kidneys and bladder. (The earliest of these probably refer to a wild species, such as A. acutifolius, the later ones to garden asparagus. From the Romans through the Renaissance, the writers disagreed whether wild or cultivated asparagus was better for you).

The species epithet, officialis, in the scientific name Asparagus officinalis, means "of the work shop", that is, the one the herbalist recommended. That choice of species epithet means that when garden asparagus was given its scientific name, Linnaeus, who named it, recognized it as a medicinal plant.

Red asparagus is a different variety from green asparagus.

Today it is touted for its vitamin content and as a gentle diuretic (link, link).

I could not find an estimate of what percent of modern Americans have eaten asparagus. A recent study of people's reaction to asparagus found 83 of 87 participants in the study had not previously eaten asparagus. The nutrition sites speak very highly of it. If you really haven't tried it, you should.

Comments and corrections welcome.

A final, technical point about asparagus: It is not a lily. Plant classifications represent relationships, these days tested by comparing their DNA. Asparagus is classified in the plant family Asparagaceae, obviously named after it, a family which includes 152 other genera and up to 2,900 species, from yuccas (genus Yucca) and agaves (Agave) to scillas (Scilla). You can still read that it is in the lily family, Liliaceae, but that is no longer true. Historically, the lily family was a catch-all for plants with narrow leaves and flower parts in groups of three or six. DNA technology has shown those plants to be quite distantly related to lilies. Today true lilies (e.g. the madonna lily, Lilium album) are in the lily family in the order Liliales. (Species are grouped into genera, genera into families, families grouped into orders, representing ever more distant relatives). Asparagus in the family Asparagaceae is in the order Asparagales. Also classified in Asparagales are irises (family Iridaceae), orchids (family Orchidaceae), and many others. Since lilies are in a different order than asparagus, and irises and orchids are in the same order, asparagus is substantially more closely related to orchids than lilies. The two orders, Asparagales and Liliales, last had a common ancestor in the mid-Cretaceous, 125 to 110 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the earth. It is more valid to call asparagus a century plant (Agave) than a lily, because it is much more closely related.

Next post: folklore and "asparagus pee" link

References not included as links above:

Gerard, J. 1633. The Herbal or General History of Plants. Dover edition, New York. 1975.

Grieve, Mrs. M. 1932. A Modern Herbal. Dover Publications. New York. 

Gunther, R. T. 1934. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Harrison, L. 2011. A Potted History of Vegetables. Lyons Press, Guilford, CN.

Markt, S. C., E. Nuttall, C. Turman and others. 2016. Sniffing out significant 'Pee values": genome wide association study of asparagus anosmia. the BMJ. Dec 2016. published online.  https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6071

Simpson, B.B. and M. C. Ogorzaly. 2014. Plants in Our World. McGraw Hill, New York.

Spencer, J. translator. 1983. The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti. Facts on File Publications, New York. (one translation of the Tacunium Sanitatis)

I have a personal classification for plants: some are photogenic, that is, virtually every photo looks good, to unphotogenic, where most photos do not capture them. Asparagus is an unphotogenic plant. Both they eye and the camera tend to look through the foliage.

Kathy Keeler, A Wandering Botanist

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