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Apple

Malus domestica

No fruit carries more myth: the golden apples of the Hesperides, the apple of discord that launched the Trojan War, and the forbidden fruit of Eden - though the Bible never says which fruit it was.

The apple that supposedly fell before Isaac Newton became the founding image of modern physics - and a descendant of the very tree still grows at Woolsthorpe.

Cezanne is said to have vowed to 'astonish Paris with an apple' - and did, painting the fruit over and over until it reshaped how the modern eye sees a still life.

Apple

Pome fruitStory

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Asparagus

Asparagus officinalis

The Romans loved asparagus so much they froze it in the Alps to eat out of season, and coined a phrase - 'quicker than you can cook asparagus' - for anything done in a hurry.

A luxury of kings, asparagus graced French and English royal tables; Louis XIV had glasshouses built so he could eat it all year round.

Its name comes from an ancient Greek word for 'shoot' or 'sprout', and it has been eaten and painted as a delicacy for more than two thousand years.

Asparagus

Spring vegetableStory

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Avocado

Persea americana

An ice-age relic: the fruit evolved for giant ground sloths to swallow whole. The sloths are gone; brunch stepped in, leaving the tree dependent on human hands to spread it.

The word comes from the Aztec ahuacatl (meaning testicle), tying the fruit to literary motifs of fertility and strength. In the Western 1800s it was a curiosity known as the 'alligator pear' for its knobbled skin and since then the avocado has become one of the most planted fruits on earth in barely a century.

Avocado

Evergreen fruit treeStory

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Basil

Ocimum basilicum

Its name comes from the Greek basileus, 'king' - the royal herb. Ancient Greeks and Romans believed that you had to scream, rant, and hurl terrible insults and curses while planting basil seeds for the crop to thrive. This superstition bled into language; the old French phrase 'semer le basilic' (sowing basil) historically meant to stir up trouble.

During the Renaissance in Italy, men would wear a sprig of basil to signal they were open to romantic advances, and women would place a pot of basil on their balcony to welcome suitors.

In India, holy basil - tulsi - is revered as a sacred plant, tended in courtyards and honoured as a living form of a goddess.

Basil

Soft herbStory

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Bay Laurel

Laurus nobilis

In Greek myth, the laurel tree comes from the story of the nymph Daphne and the god Apollo. When Apollo chased Daphne to win her love, she prayed to her father, the river god Peneus, to save her. Her father turned her into a laurel tree and Apollo declared the laurel his sacred tree and swore to wear its leaves forever.

Roman victors and poets were crowned with laurel wreaths; the words 'laureate,' 'baccalaureate' and 'bachelor's degree' all descend from that garland of bay.

Beyond the myth, the humble bay leaf is one of the kitchen's oldest aromatics - dropped whole into the stockpot and lifted out again, flavouring slow dishes across the Mediterranean.

Bay Laurel

Culinary treeStory

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Beetroot

Beta vulgaris

The Romans prized the beet as medicine and aphrodisiac, and ate its leaves more than its root; the swollen crimson root we know was a later, northern development.

That deep red is betanin - a pigment so intense it has been used to dye cloth and tint food, and it stains the fingers of every cook who has ever peeled one.

Borscht, the beet soup of Ukraine and its neighbours, is old enough to be woven into folk song and proverb - a dish of survival turned national emblem.

Beetroot

Root vegetableStory

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Blueberry

Vaccinium corymbosum

Blueberries have been eaten for 13,000 years. Native to North America, the blueberry was a 'star berry' to some First Nations peoples, who saw the five-pointed calyx at its base as a gift sent to relieve hunger; it was dried, smoked and pounded into pemmican, a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and dried berries.

Unlike almost every other fruit, the blueberry resisted the farm until the 1900s - the wild berry of Maine and Canada was not successfully cultivated until 1916.

Blueberries are loved by bears, foxes, rabbits, and deer, and many species of birds like robins and thrushes.

Blueberry

Bush berryStory

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Bok Choy

Brassica rapa subsp. chinensis

Bok choy has been grown in China for well over a thousand years; its name means 'white vegetable,' and it is still one of the most eaten greens across Asia.

A cousin of cabbage and turnip, bok choy travelled Asia's trade routes for centuries and reached Western kitchens only in the last hundred years.

Cooks prize it for having two textures in one plant - crisp, juicy stems and tender leaves - and it is often served at Lunar New Year as a symbol of prosperity.

Bok Choy

Asian GreenStory

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Bottlebrush

Melaleuca citrina

The bottlebrush's brilliant red flower spikes are shaped exactly like a brush used to clean bottles, bristling with nectar-heavy stamens.

Long known as Callistemon - Greek for 'beautiful stamens' - and now reclassified among the melaleucas, it keeps the name citrina for leaves that smell of lemon when crushed. First Nations people soaked the flower spikes in water for a sweet, nectar-rich drink.

A magnet for honeyeaters and lorikeets, the bottlebrush is one of the most planted of all Australian natives - so tough it flowers along highways and drainage lines where little else survives.

Bottlebrush

Native shrubStory

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Broad Beans

Vicia faba

One of the oldest crops of the Old World, the broad bean fed the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and was the only bean Europe knew before the Americas gave it all the others.

Pythagoras forbade his followers to eat broad beans, some say for a belief they held the souls of the dead, others that he had glimpsed the danger they pose to those with a rare inherited blood condition.

In Roman times a bean was baked into a Saturnalia cake to choose a mock 'king' for a feast - the origin of the lucky charm still hidden in Twelfth Night and king cakes across Europe today.

Broad Beans

Podded legumeStory

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Broccoli

Brassica oleracea

Broccoli's name comes from the Italian broccolo, 'the flowering top of a cabbage.' Grown from wild cabbage in Roman times, it reached England only in the 1700s, where it was long called 'Italian asparagus.'

Thomas Jefferson, a devoted gardener, recorded sowing broccoli seed at Monticello in 1767 - among the first planted in America.

Bred over centuries from the same wild cabbage as kale and cauliflower, broccoli is less a wild plant than a human invention - the flower we harvest before it ever blooms.

Broccoli

Flowering brassicaStory

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Brussels Sprout

Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera

Brussels sprouts rose to fame around Brussels - grown across the Low Countries since at least the 1500s and spread through Europe from Belgian market gardens.

Long the most argued-over vegetable on the table, their bitterness has been quietly bred out in recent decades, turning a childhood dread into a fashionable side.

They grow in a striking spiral of buds up a single tall stalk - often sold still on the stem in winter, when a frost has turned their starch to sugar.

Brussels Sprout

Winter brassicaStory

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Cabbage

Brassica oleracea

Cato the Elder thought the cabbage the finest of all vegetables and a cure for almost every ailment - Rome's great believer in the healing leaf.

In Northern Europe the cabbage was winter survival itself: salted into sauerkraut and, across Asia, into kimchi, its vitamin C once saving sailors from scurvy.

The French endearment mon petit chou - 'my little cabbage' - and the old tale that babies are found under cabbage leaves, both cast this humble plant as unexpectedly tender.

Cabbage

Leafy BrassicaStory

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Cape Gooseberry

Physalis peruviana

Wrapped in its own papery lantern, the Cape gooseberry is a South American native - a cousin of the tomato and tomatillo - prized by the Inca long before it travelled the world.

Its name comes from the Cape of Good Hope, where early settlers grew it so successfully that it seemed to belong there, though it had come from the slopes of the Andes. It self-seeds so cheerfully that old gardens never lose it.

That delicate husk, drying to a filigree cage around the golden berry, has made it as much a decoration as a fruit - the jewel perched on the edge of a dessert plate.

Cape Gooseberry

Husk fruitStory

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Capsicum

Capsicum annuum

Columbus, hunting for black pepper, found the chilli instead and called it 'pepper' - a mistake that has clung to every capsicum since. The mild, sweet kinds were bred later in Europe.

Carried from the Americas to the Ottoman world and on to Hungary, the ground pepper became paprika - so central to the cuisine that a Hungarian scientist won a Nobel Prize partly for isolating vitamin C from it.

Ripening from green through gold to red, the capsicum has long been the painter's shortcut to a note of pure colour in a market still life.

Capsicum

Fruiting vegetableStory

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Carrot

Daucus carota

Carrots were purple, white and yellow for most of history; the familiar orange root was popularised by Dutch growers in the 1600s - supposedly to honour the Royal House of Orange - a fine story, but never quite proven.

In the Second World War, Britain spread the myth that its pilots' night vision came from eating carrots - partly to hide the invention of radar, partly to shift a surplus crop. The kernel of truth: vitamin A really does aid sight.

The carrot appears in Dutch Golden Age painting as the everyman's vegetable - set against the luxury of lobster and lemon, a quiet emblem of honest, common fare.

Carrot

Root vegetableStory

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Cauliflower

Brassica oleracea var. botrytis

Mark Twain called cauliflower 'nothing but cabbage with a college education' - a humble brassica dressed up as something finer.

Cauliflower travelled from the eastern Mediterranean through the Arab world to Europe, where it became a prized delicacy on grand Renaissance tables.

The tight white head is really a mass of flower buds arrested before they bloom - and its lime-green cousin, romanesco, forms a perfect natural fractal.

Cauliflower

Flowering BrassicaStory

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Celery

Apium graveolens

The ancient Greeks crowned the victors of the Nemean and Isthmian Games with wreaths of wild celery, the same plant they wove for the dead - a herb of both triumph and mourning.

To Homer's world celery (selinon) was a funeral plant grown on graves; to say a sick man "had need only of celery" was to say he was as good as buried.

A Victorian luxury served upright in cut-glass "celery vases," it was prized as a spring tonic - and later flavoured Dr Brown's Cel-Ray, a celery soda still sold today.

Celery

Stalk vegetableStory

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Cherry (Ornamental)

Prunus serrulata

The Japanese flowering cherry, or sakura, is the very emblem of transience - its brief, glorious bloom highlights the beauty of things that do not last.

To the samurai the falling blossom mirrored a life ideally lived: brilliant, brief, and surrendered without clinging - the flower and the warrior's code entwined.

Blooming briefly for just one to two weeks each spring, they inspired the tradition of hanami (flower viewing), classical waka and haiku poetry, and Edo-period woodblock prints.

Cherry (Ornamental)

Blossom treeStory

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Chilli

Capsicum annuum

Chillies were first cultivated in the Americas thousands of years ago; Columbus, hunting for black pepper, carried them to Europe and mistakenly named them 'pepper.'

Within a century of leaving the Americas, the chilli had transformed the cooking of India, China and Thailand - few plants have reshaped world cuisine so fast.

Its heat is measured on the Scoville scale, from the mild warmth of a jalapeño to super hot varieties bred to be almost unbearable - a heat that is felt as pain, not taste.

Chilli

Fruiting vegetableStory

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Clematis

Clematis spp.

The wild European species is known as 'traveller's joy' for the way it garlands the hedgerows, and 'old man's beard' for the silvery seed-heads that smoke along the lanes in autumn.

In the age of faith it was called 'virgin's bower,' said to have sheltered Mary on the flight into Egypt - a climbing plant given a place in sacred legend.

Its name comes from the Greek klema, 'a climbing vine'; gardeners have prized it since the sixteenth century as the 'queen of climbers' for the way it clothes a wall in flower.

Clematis

Flowering climberStory

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Cucumber

Cucumis sativus

The emperor Tiberius craved cucumbers daily, in and out of season, so his gardeners raised them on wheeled carts and under sheets of translucent crystalline gypsum stone - an early greenhouse, built for one man's appetite.

'Cool as a cucumber' is more than a phrase: the flesh inside can sit several degrees below the surrounding air. The saying entered English in the early 1700s.

In Jane Austen's era the cucumber sandwich became the badge of idle gentility - later immortalised by Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest, where Algernon devours every last one.

Cucumber

Salad vegetableStory

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Daffodil

Narcissus pseudonarcissus

The daffodil takes its Latin name from Narcissus, the youth of Greek myth who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away, becoming the flower that bows its head over the water.

Wordsworth gave it English immortality in 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', his host of golden daffodils fluttering and dancing beside the lake - perhaps the most famous flowers in poetry.

As the emblem of Wales, the daffodil is worn each St David's Day on the first of March, its early bloom the herald of spring after winter.

Daffodil

Spring bulbStory

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Dill

Anethum graveolens

The name comes from the old Norse word dilla, 'to soothe' - for centuries 'dill water' was given to calm colicky, crying babies, a remedy still sold today.

In the Middle Ages dill was thought to guard against witchcraft; hung over a doorway, it was believed to break spells and keep evil away.

Ancient Egyptians and Romans valued dill as both medicine and a sign of wealth, and Roman soldiers ate it for courage and to help heal their wounds.

Dill

Culinary herbStory

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Eggplant

Solanum melongena

Native to India and long grown across Asia, the eggplant reached Europe through the Arab world; its English name recalls early varieties that were small, white and egg-shaped.

Medieval Europeans were deeply suspicious of it - a member of the nightshade family, it was nicknamed the 'mad apple' and blamed for fevers and madness.

Across the world it is also the aubergine or brinjal, starring in dishes from Middle Eastern baba ganoush to Italian parmigiana and Indian baingan bharta.

Eggplant

Fruiting vegetableStory

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English Lavender

Lavandula angustifolia

Its name comes from the Latin lavare, 'to wash': the Romans scented their baths and laundry with it, and the word still carries that note of cleanliness two thousand years on.

Bundled into linen and burned in sickrooms, lavender was long believed to ward off plague and moth alike - the perfumers of medieval Grasse who scented leather with it were said to escape the worst of the Black Death.

The purple fields of Provence have made it the very perfume of the south of France, though the plant is a Mediterranean native grown for its calming oil since antiquity.

English Lavender

Flowering shrubStory

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Fennel

Foeniculum vulgare

To the ancient Greeks fennel was the plant of Marathon - the famous battlefield was a field of wild fennel, and the Greek word for it gave both the place and the race their name.

Greek myth held that the gods' knowledge, and the first stolen fire, were carried down to humankind hidden inside a hollow fennel stalk.

Hung over the door on Midsummer's Eve and pushed into keyholes, fennel was once believed to keep witches and evil spirits away through the shortest nights.

Fennel

Bulb vegetableStory

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Fig

Ficus carica

The fig is one of the oldest cultivated plants on earth - fig trees were tended in the Jordan Valley before wheat was ever sown - and it threads through every Mediterranean myth.

It was a fig leaf that Adam and Eve reached for in Eden, and figs that fed the Roman legions; Cleopatra is said to have met her end by a snake hidden in a basket of them.

Every edible fig depends on a tiny wasp: the flowers bloom hidden inside the fruit, and only the fig wasp can crawl in to pollinate them - a partnership millions of years old.

Fig

Orchard FruitStory

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Garlic

Allium sativum

For thousands of years garlic has been both food and medicine - the workers who built the Egyptian pyramids were fed it for strength, and it was buried in Tutankhamun's tomb.

Long believed to ward off evil, garlic was hung over doorways against witches and, most famously, said to keep vampires away in European folklore.

Ancient Greek athletes ate garlic before the Olympic Games and Roman soldiers before battle, both trusting it for strength and courage - perhaps the first performance enhancer.

Garlic

Bulb vegetableStory

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Grape

Vitis vinifera

No fruit is more tangled in myth than the grape. To the Greeks and Romans it belonged to Dionysus (or Bacchus), the god of wine - so the vine came to stand for both the pleasures of civilisation and the ruin of drinking too deeply.

Painters from ancient Rome to Caravaggio used the grape as a picture of abundance, yet often tucked a single rotting berry into the bunch, a quiet reminder that all good things, and all life, must end.

In one of Aesop's fables, a fox can't reach a high bunch of grapes and decides they must be sour anyway - the origin of the phrase 'sour grapes,' still used when someone scorns what they secretly can't have.

Grape

Vine fruitStory

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Grevillea

Grevillea juniperina

With spidery clusters of blooms, grevilleas are among Australia's great bird plants - their nectar-rich flowers draw honeyeaters and lorikeets through the coldest months, when little else is in flower.

The genus honours Charles Greville, an eighteenth-century patron of botany and co-founder of London's Royal Horticultural Society, though the plants themselves are almost entirely Australian.

First Nations people have long sipped the sweet nectar straight from the flower, or soaked the blooms in water for a sweet drink - one of the bush's natural sources of sugar.

Grevillea

Native shrubStory

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Horseradish

Armoracia rusticana

Horseradish is one of the 'bitter herbs' of the Jewish Passover Seder, eaten as maror to recall the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.

Medieval Europeans valued it as medicine long before food, using the fiery root for everything from coughs to aches; only later did it reach the table beside roast beef.

Its heat comes from the same family of compounds as mustard and wasabi - in fact, most 'wasabi' served outside Japan is really dyed horseradish.

Horseradish

Root VegetableStory

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Jasmine

Jasminum officinale

The name comes from the Persian yasmin, and jasmine's night-opening flowers have perfumed gardens and poetry across Persia, India and the Arab world for centuries.

In many cultures jasmine is the flower of love and welcome - strung into garlands in India, worn in the hair, and offered to both guests and gods.

It scents the world's finest perfumes and teas: it takes many thousands of blooms, hand-picked at night when the fragrance peaks, to make a single ounce of oil.

Jasmine

Flowering ClimberStory

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Kale

Brassica oleracea var. sabellica

Kale is one of the oldest cultivated forms of the cabbage, eaten across Europe for over two thousand years, long before the headed cabbage was ever bred.

Through hard winters and wartime rationing, hardy kale kept people fed when little else grew - in Scotland 'kale' once simply meant dinner, and the kitchen garden the 'kaleyard.'

All but forgotten as peasant food, kale was rediscovered as a 'superfood' in the 2000s, leaping from the allotment to the smoothie almost overnight.

Kale

Leafy BrassicaStory

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Kangaroo Grass

Themeda triandra

Kangaroo Grass once carpeted vast stretches of south-eastern Australia, and for tens of thousands of years First Nations people harvested its seed heads to grind into flour, part of sophisticated land management practices using fire and selective harvesting that shaped the grasslands themselves.

Early colonists described 'waving fields' of it stretching to the horizon, mistaking managed Aboriginal grassland for wild pasture.

Its reddish, flame-shaped seed heads turn a deep copper in summer, apt for a grass that prevents severe wildfires.

Kangaroo Grass

Native grassStory

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Kangaroo Paw

Anigozanthos flavidus

The red-and-green kangaroo paw is the floral emblem of Western Australia, found in the wild only in the state's south-west.

Its velvety, tubular flowers - furred like an animal's paw - are filled with nectar and shaped for the beaks of honeyeaters, which pollinate the plant as they feed, carrying pollen from flower to flower. Few plants are so precisely built around the birds that visit them.

Its furred flowers come in an unusual range of colours - green, yellow, orange, even near-black - a palette rare in the plant world and much prized by florists.

Kangaroo Paw

Native perennialStory

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Leek

Allium porrum

The leek is the national emblem of Wales, worn on St David's Day - legend says the seventh-century St David bid Welsh soldiers wear one in their caps to tell friend from foe in battle against the Saxons.

Shakespeare has the Welsh captain Fluellen force the boastful Pistol to eat a raw leek in Henry V, cementing the vegetable's place as a badge of Welsh pride.

Prized since antiquity, the leek was the emperor Nero's cure for his singing voice - he ate so many that Rome mocked him as 'Porrophagus,' the leek-eater.

Leek

Stem vegetableStory

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Lemon

Citrus limon

The half-peeled lemon, its rind spiralling over the table's edge, is the signature flourish of Dutch Golden Age painting - beautiful, sharp, and a quiet reminder that all pleasures sour.

The lemon helped win an empire: British sailors dosed with citrus beat back scurvy and earned the nickname 'limeys,' giving the Royal Navy a decisive edge at sea.

Goethe's longing for the warm south - "Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?" - made the lemon the very emblem of Italy for northern Europe.

Lemon

Citrus treeStory

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Lettuce

Lactuca sativa

The Romans served lettuce to bring on sleep, and its milky sap was long thought a gentle sedative. The poet Martial joked that once the fashion changed and it was served first, it risked spoiling the guest's rest.

Sacred to the Egyptian god Min, the tall lettuce was carried in fertility processions as a symbol of virility - one of the oldest cultivated salad plants in the world.

Beatrix Potter wrote of the 'soporific effect of lettuces' in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies - folklore with a grain of truth, since wild lettuce sap does hold mild sedative compounds.

Lettuce

Leafy greenStory

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Lilly Pilly

Syzygium smithii

Half the hedges in Australia are secretly orchards - the pink berry show every summer is edible, and almost nobody knows.

It's bush food in plain sight.

A rainforest native of Australia's east coast, First Nations people ate the tart berries fresh or crushed them into drinks; today lilly pillies - the prized riberry among them - flavour jams, sauces and native chutneys.

Fast-growing, dense and endlessly clippable, the lilly pilly has become the great hedging plant of Australian gardens - a wall of glossy leaves flushing bronze-pink with each new growth.

Lilly Pilly

Native hedge treeStory

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Macadamia

Macadamia integrifolia

The macadamia is the only Australian native plant grown as a major commercial food crop - Aboriginal peoples of the east-coast rainforests, who called it kindal-kindal and boombera, gathered and traded its nuts for millennia.

It was named in 1857 for the Scottish-Australian chemist Dr John Macadam, a friend of the botanist who first described it - an Australian nut with a very Scottish name.

Though the world thinks of Hawaii, nearly all commercial macadamias trace back to Australia - and much of the global crop is said to descend from a single tree taken from Queensland in the nineteenth century.

Macadamia

Native nut treeStory

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Mint

Mentha spicata

In Greek myth Minthe was a river nymph loved by Hades; his jealous queen Persephone trampled her, and Hades softened the curse by turning Minthe into the fragrant herb we crush underfoot still.

The Romans crowned themselves with mint at feasts and rubbed it over their tables, believing its scent sharpened both the mind and the appetite.

Mint has flavoured everything from Roman digestives to the Kentucky Julep - an iconic, refreshing bourbon cocktail, and in the language of hospitality, a sprig has long meant 'welcome'.

Mint

Culinary herbStory

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Olive

Olea europaea

Olive trees are among the longest-lived on earth - some in the Mediterranean are said to be over two thousand years old and still bearing fruit - plant one and you're gardening for people you'll never meet.

Romans used olive oil across their vast empire for nutrition, fuel, and bathing. Instead of soap, Romans rubbed olive oil over their skin at the public baths to trap dirt and sweat and scraped the oil and grime off using a curved metal tool called a strigil.

Olive pomace can be turned into a solid biofuel - dry the wet pulp and pits, mix the fibrous skins and crushed seeds, and firm into a briquette press. This creates a high-energy, low-smoke alternative to firewood.

Olive

Evergreen treeStory

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Onion

Allium cepa

The ancient Egyptians saw the onion's concentric rings as a symbol of eternity and buried them with their dead - onions were found in the eye sockets of Ramesses IV, and pyramid workers were paid partly in them.

The name descends from the Latin unio, 'a single large pearl' - one bulb, one unified whole: the Roman farmer's pearl.

On the stage of Shakespeare's day, an onion hidden in a handkerchief was the trick for summoning false tears - the original crocodile weeping.

Onion

Bulb vegetableStory

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Parsley

Petroselinum crispum

The Greeks wreathed victors of the games in parsley and strewed it on graves - so bound to death that 'to be in need of parsley' meant to be at the point of dying.

An old superstition held that parsley seed went to the Devil and back seven times before sprouting, which is why it is so famously slow to germinate.

More than a garnish, parsley has flavoured European cooking since antiquity - the base of French persillade, Italian gremolata, and Middle Eastern tabbouleh alike.

Parsley

Culinary herbStory

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Parsnip

Pastinaca sativa

Before the potato reached Europe, the parsnip was the everyday starchy root - sweet, filling and cheap, it fed families and armies through the winter for centuries.

The Romans prized parsnips and spread them across their empire; the emperor Tiberius is said to have had them shipped all the way from Germany for his table.

So sweet is the root that medieval cooks turned it into jams and puddings, and it was later brewed into wine and country beer before sugar became affordable.

Parsnip

Root vegetableStory

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Passionfruit

Passiflora edulis

The name has nothing to do with romance: 'passion' here means suffering, from the Latin pati, 'to endure.' Gardeners just call the vine supporting the back fence, 'the fence eater.'

The symmetrical, striking geometry of the passionflower made it a favourite motif for Victorian era wallpaper, ceramics, and textile designs.

Behind the tough, wrinkling shell lies one of the most intensely perfumed fruits on earth - a vine of tropical South America now grown in warm gardens the world over.

Passionfruit

Climbing vineStory

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Pear

Pyrus communis

Homer called the pear one of the 'gifts of the gods'. It ripened in the fabled garden of Alcinous and the Romans spread it across Europe, grafting it into hundreds of varieties.

Beloved of the still-life painters, the ripe pear stood for the fleeting moment before decay - beauty at its peak, and the fall to come.

In China the pear is an emblem of longevity, yet because 'li' means both 'pear' and 'parting', lovers will not share one - to split a pear is to split apart.

Pear

Pome fruitStory

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Potato

Solanum tuberosum

The potato was first grown in the Andes thousands of years ago and carried to Europe by Spanish explorers in the 1500s, where it was at first feared as poisonous.

Once accepted, it fed the growth of Europe - but a disease that destroyed the crop caused the Irish Famine of the 1840s, one of history's great tragedies.

Frederick the Great forced the potato on a doubtful Prussia by planting royal fields and posting guards - knowing that whatever seemed worth guarding must be worth stealing.

Potato

Root vegetableStory

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Pumpkin

Cucurbita maxima

The carved pumpkin lantern is American, but the custom is Irish - the tale of 'Stingy Jack,' doomed to wander with an ember in a hollowed turnip. Immigrants simply found the native pumpkin far easier to carve.

Perrault's Cinderella gave the pumpkin its most enduring role, transformed into a golden coach - the humblest field crop as the very symbol of magical change.

One of the 'three sisters' of Indigenous American agriculture, grown alongside corn and beans, pumpkin kept the early American colonists alive through their first hard winters.

Pumpkin

Winter squashStory

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Raspberry

Rubus idaeus

Greek legend says raspberries were once white, until the nymph Ida pricked her finger picking them for the infant Zeus and stained the fruit red forever - hence its botanical name, Rubus idaeus, 'bramble of Ida.'

Long grown in monastery gardens, the raspberry was a luxury of the medieval table, its leaf a herbalist's staple, and its brief season making the fruit all the more prized.

Too soft to travel far before refrigeration, the raspberry was for centuries a fruit you could only know if you grew it - the very definition of a garden luxury.

Raspberry

Cane fruitStory

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River Red Gum

Eucalyptus camaldulensis

These trees line inland rivers and floodplains across Australia, growing quickly when water is plentiful - often over a metre a year in youth - but slowing dramatically with age, so the biggest old-growth specimens can be many centuries old.

Their hollows, which can take over a hundred years to form, are prime real estate for Superb Parrots, Barking Owls, sugar gliders, and microbats, while the canopy is a favourite nesting site for herons and egrets in flood years. A single old giant can shelter dozens of species.

Along the Murray-Darling, First Nations people carved canoes and shields from the bark of these same trees, leaving ‘scar trees' still standing today.

River Red Gum

Native treeStory

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Rose

Rosa spp.

No flower carries more meaning: sacred to Aphrodite and Venus, worn by Cleopatra, and the symbol of England's Wars of the Roses, where red and white blooms became the badges of rival dynasties.

To speak sub rosa - 'under the rose' - is to speak in secret; the Romans hung a rose above the table to promise that what was said beneath it would never leave the room.

Sappho crowned it 'queen of flowers' in the sixth century BC, and it has reigned ever since - the emblem of love, of England, and of silence, all at once.

Rose

Flowering shrubStory

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Rosemary

Salvia rosmarinus

Rosemary is the herb of remembrance - 'there's rosemary, that's for remembrance,' says Shakespeare's Ophelia. Ancient Greek scholars wore rosemary garlands while they studied, believing it sharpened the mind - a folk belief that modern research into its scent and memory has treated surprisingly kindly.

Its name comes from the Latin ros marinus, 'dew of the sea,' for the way it grows wild along the Mediterranean coast, dusted with salt spray.

During plague times, people carried pouches of rosemary or burned it in hospitals during outbreaks, believing its scent cleansed the air of disease.

Rosemary

Woody herbStory

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Sage

Salvia officinalis

To the Romans, sage was the herb of long life and healing - its Latin name, salvia, comes from salvere, 'to be well.' They believed no one with sage in the garden need fear illness.

Medieval Europe prized sage above almost every other herb, planting it by the door for protection and brewing it into tonics said to sharpen the memory and lengthen life.

Burned as a dried bundle, sage has long been used to cleanse and freshen a room - a custom that survives today in the 'smudge stick'.

Sage

Culinary herbStory

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Silverbeet

Beta vulgaris

Silverbeet, also known as Chard, is the same species as the beetroot, but bred for its leaves rather than its root.

In 800 AD it was one of the nearly 90 specific herbs, vegetables, and fruit trees required in Emperor Charlemagne's royal gardens, taking the vegetable from a localised Mediterranean crop to an officially endorsed imperial vegetable.

Named in some regions for the pale, silvery midrib of its leaves, silverbeet is the reliable year-round green of the kitchen garden - cut-and-come-again, and almost impossible to kill.

Silverbeet

Leafy greenStory

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Snow Pea

Pisum sativum var. saccharatum

The snow pea is eaten pod and all - its French name, mangetout, simply means 'eat it all'.

The humble pea shaped modern science: in a monastery garden in the 1860s, Gregor Mendel crossed thousands of pea plants and, from their smooth and wrinkled seeds, uncovered the basic laws of heredity.

Snow peas are among the oldest cultivated vegetables, with archaeological traces dating back thousands of years. Long a staple of Chinese cooking - their crispness and quick cooking making them a favourite of the Cantonese stir-fry and the modern kitchen garden.

Snow Pea

Climbing legumeStory

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Society Garlic

Tulbaghia violacea

This edible plant's name is a play on manners: the leaves smell of garlic, but are a more polite seasoning than the real thing - a garlic fit for society, with no lingering breath.

The botanical name honours Ryk Tulbagh, an eighteenth-century Dutch governor of the Cape; the plant is a South African native, carried into gardens worldwide for its violet and white flowers.

In its homeland the Zulu have long used society garlic as food and medicine, and planted it around their homes in the belief that its scent drives away snakes.

Society Garlic

Scented perennialStory

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Spinach

Spinacia oleracea

Spinach's muscle-building fame, cemented by Popeye in the 1930s, was long blamed on a misplaced decimal that overstated its iron tenfold. The truth is gentler: it's nutritious, just not magical.

Spinach travelled from ancient Persia along the Silk Road to China and Moorish Spain; legend credits Catherine de' Medici's love of it for the name still given to any dish served on a bed of spinach - a la Florentine.

Grown in monastery and cottage gardens alike, spinach is the thrifty cook's green. It's quick to wilt to nothing, but quicker still to revive a plate with colour.

Spinach

Leafy GreenStory

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Strawberry

Fragaria × ananassa

The modern strawberry is an accident - a Chilean and a North American species met in a French garden in the 1750s and never looked back. The English name may come from the straw once laid beneath the plants, or from the runners that 'strew' across the ground.

In medieval painting the strawberry stood for purity and righteousness, its three-part leaf a sign of the Trinity - hidden symbolism tucked into many a Renaissance altarpiece.

Strawberries and cream have been served at Wimbledon since 1877 - the taste of an English summer - while Revolutionary France's Madame Tallien is said to have bathed in their juice.

Strawberry

Soft fruitStory

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Tarragon

Artemisia dracunculus

Its Latin name, dracunculus, means 'little dragon' - named for its coiling, serpent-like roots, and once thought to cure the bites of snakes and mad dogs.

Tarragon is one of the 'fines herbes' at the heart of French cooking - the essential flavour of béarnaise sauce and a classic partner to chicken and eggs.

Brought to Europe from the Asian steppes, most likely by returning Crusaders, tarragon was chewed to numb the mouth and prized in the gardens of Tudor kings.

Tarragon

Culinary herbStory

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Thyme

Thymus vulgaris

Thyme was the very breath of courage to the Greeks and Romans - soldiers bathed in it before battle, and medieval ladies stitched sprigs into the scarves of their knights.

Its name may descend from the Greek thymos, 'courage' or 'spirit'; to 'smell of thyme' was, in Athens, to be graceful and brave.

Long burned as temple incense and tucked among linen against moths, thyme was also laid with the dead in ancient Egypt - a herb of both the altar and the grave.

Thyme

Culinary herbStory

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Tomato

Solanum lycopersicum

Tomatoes arrived in Europe from the Aztec world in the sixteenth century and were grown for two hundred years purely as an ornamental curiosity - the Italians called it pomodoro, "golden apple," the French pomme d'amour, "love apple" and it was feared as poison long before anyone dared to eat it.

A member of the nightshade family, whose leaves really are mildly toxic, which is why Renaissance Europe grew the tomato for show, not for supper. Only Naples, and the birth of the pizza, finally coaxed it onto the plate.

The word comes from the Nahuatl tomatl. Warhol made the Campbell's soup can an icon in 1962, but the fruit's real fame came slower - it has been the taste of Italy for a century and a half.

Tomato

Fruiting vineStory

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Wisteria

Wisteria sinensis

Wisteria takes its name from Caspar Wistar, an American anatomist - a delicate flower named, a little oddly, after a professor of human bones.

In Japan the wisteria (fuji) is ancient and beloved; some trained specimens are over a thousand years old, their cascading blossoms drawn into famous woodblock prints.

A symbol of love, longevity and poetic beauty in East Asian art, wisteria in the Victorian language of flowers stood for a warm and clinging devotion.

Wisteria

Flowering ClimberStory

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Wollemi Pine

Wollemia nobilis

Known from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, the Wollemi pine was found alive in 1994 by ranger David Noble, deep in a canyon less than 150km from Sydney. Fewer than 100 wild trees survive, in a grove whose location is kept secret to protect them. A living relic from the age of dinosaurs, it has barely changed in a hundred million years - one of the great botanical finds of the century.

To safeguard the species, cuttings have been propagated and sold to gardeners worldwide.

Its bark is unmistakable, knobbled like bubbling chocolate, and in cold snaps the growing tips sheathe themselves in a waxy white 'polar cap' against the frost.

Wollemi Pine

Native ConiferStory

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Woodland Sage

Salvia nemorosa

Plant a Salvia and the bees will find it before you've washed your hands. It has spires of violet that flower for months if deadheaded after the first flush. Woodland sage is the ornamental cousin of the kitchen herb: grown not for the pot but for its long violet flower spikes, which draw bees and butterflies all summer.

Salvia takes its name from the Latin salvere, 'to heal' or 'to save' - the same root as 'salvation' - for the ancient belief that the sage clan could cure almost anything.

An old proverb ran, 'Why should a man die who has sage in his garden?' - a measure of the esteem in which the whole Salvia family was once held.

Woodland Sage

Flowering perennialStory

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Zucchini

Cucurbita pepo

Though all squashes are native to the Americas, the zucchini as we know it was bred in nineteenth-century Italy - the name means 'little squash' - and only sailed back across the Atlantic with Italian immigrants in the 1920s.

Squash was one of the 'three sisters' of Indigenous American planting, grown with corn and beans; the slim green courgette is an Old World refinement of that ancient crop.

Famous for its generosity, the zucchini has its own folklore of glut - gardeners joke of locking their cars in summer lest neighbours fill them with marrows. Its golden flower, battered and fried, is a delicacy in Rome.

Zucchini

Summer squashStory

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