The case of the weird parsley

When we moved into our house the garden was full of self-sown parsley.  We ate it on everything – salads, pasta sauces, stews, you name it.  Slowly it dawned on me that our parsley was not like other parsley.  It didn’t look like curly-leaved parsley or like the flat-leaved Italian parsley.  It had very large leaves with a semi-crinkled appearance.  They had a strong parsley flavour and were rather tender in texture – even in the older, bigger leaves.  They flourished in our garden and self-sowed with abandon.  I wondered if it was flat-leaved parsley with some type of plant virus or if we had a new-type of parsley that I’d never heard of before.  But mostly I just ate and ate it and it never seemed to run out

Then about two weeks ago as I was taking these pictures it suddenly hit me.  We have weird parsley precisely because it isn’t flat or curly parsley… it’s a hybrid!  Perfectly suited to our garden. It isn’t like either type of parsley because it’s neither… and it’s both. And it created itself right here in the breeding ground and natural laboratory that is our garden. Nature  doesn’t care about our neat categories, it looks after its self. Duh!