Celery the winners of the sacred Nemean Games was also made of celery. The Ancient Greek colony of Selinous (, "Selinous"), on Sicily, was named after wild parsley that grew abundantly there; Selinountian coins depicted a parsley leaf as the symbol of the city. The perennial BBC television series Doctor Who featured the Fifth Doctor (played by Peter Davison, from 1981–84), who wore a sprig of celery as a corsage. The name "celery" retraces the plant's route of successive adoption in European cooking, as the English "celery" (1664) is derived from the French "céleri" coming from the Lombard term, "seleri", from
Celery cultivars have been selected for solid petioles, leaf stalks. A celery stalk readily separates into "strings" which are bundles of angular collenchyma cells exterior to the vascular bundles. Wild celery, "Apium graveolens" var. "graveolens", grows to tall. It occurs around the globe. The first cultivation is thought to have happened in the Mediterranean region, where the natural habitats were salty and wet, or marshy soils near the coast where celery grew in agropyro-rumicion-plant communities. North of the alps wild celery is found only in the foothill zone on soils with some salt content. It prefers moist or wet, nutrient rich,