For those of you unfamiliar with this minor celebrity vegetable, here's a picture of it:

enter image description here

As far as I know, the Fifth Doctor wore it for his entire run, but we didn't get anything resembling an in-universe explanation for it until his very last episode, The Caves of Androzani.

PERI: Doctor, why do you wear a stick of celery in your lapel?
DOCTOR: Does it offend you?
PERI: No, I'm just curious.
PERI: How does the celery help?
DOCTOR: If the gas is present, the celery turns purple.
PERI: And then what do you do?

Sadly, the celery never did turn purple, so we never found out if it was legitimately useful.

But considering it was around for a very long time before the writers felt the need to acknowledge it, its presence probably has more to do with making the costume look ever-so-slightly abnormal rather than any in-universe benefits. Which begs the question: Is there any particular reason they chose celery as the random weird thing to put on Peter Davison's costume?

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    A nano-second of googling turned this up; doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv10/celery.html – Valorum May 8 '16 at 19:48
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    They wanted to attract the rabbit demographic. – Rogue Jedi May 8 '16 at 19:53
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    @ixrec - searching for [Peter Davison Celery] turned up at least 4 links (on the first page) that would handily answer this question. – Valorum May 8 '16 at 21:06
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    "Hey, I'm the Doctor, I can save the universe using a kettle and some string - and look at me, I'm wearing a vegetable!" – Rand al'Thor May 8 '16 at 21:20
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    @Randal'Thor Part of me still wants to know why in Enlightenment he swapped his celery with one from the spaceship's buffet. I think that's the only time he ever did anything with the celery other than The Caves of Androzani. – Ixrec May 8 '16 at 21:28

Unknown, but maybe because it was unusual

As indicated in the comment by Richard, the celery idea was due to the producer, John Nathan-Turner, who did not offer an explanation for it.


—Peter Davison

Davison later expanded upon this:

At the first costume fitting, [Producer] John Nathan-Turner said I should have something odd and unique on the lapel. And he came to me a couple weeks later and said, ‘stick a celery on your lapel.’ I said okay, as long as you explain it. And we preceded to do three seasons and I said, you still haven’t explained the celery. So they wrote this bit for my last story ‘The Caves of Androzani’ that explained it as an antidote to a poison... which it also detected.

So it would seems that the main reason for choosing the celery was that it was unusual.

Note that this shows that the in-universe justifications are clearly not Nathan-Turner's original reason, since Davison had to push for any such explanation to be given.

He also gave a facetious explanation at one point, although his later comments (and the fact that Davison disliked celery) suggest that this was not intended to be taken as true:

“In case I get peckish!” said Peter Davison. We were in the Tardis. Not the real one I grant you, but a mock-up at the Longleat Doctor Who Exhibition way back in 1982. The snotty-nosed eleven year old incarnation of myself had just asked his beloved fifth Doctor why he always wore a stick of celery on his lapel, while he scribbled his signature on my Doctor Who Annual. It was an entirely valid question of course and the Doctor had given me a completely honest answer. Or so I thought.

As suggested by the Tardis Data Core, it is possible (though perhaps not likely) that Nathan-Turner was inspired by The Avengers (the 1960s spy series, not the superhero movie), where the notion of a character wearing celery had previously been mentioned.

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