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 medicinal herbs and vegetables the Frankish emperor desired to see grown. At some later point in medieval Europe celery displaced alexanders. Celery's late arrival in the English kitchen is an end-product of the long tradition of seed selection needed to reduce the sap's bitterness and increase its sugars. By 1699, John Evelyn could recommend it in his "Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets": "Sellery, apium Italicum, (and of the Petroseline Family) was formerly a stranger with us (nor very long since in Italy) is an hot and more generous sort of Macedonian Persley or Smallage... and for its high and grateful