Daucus carota (Apiaceae), Germany, 2007. One of the nice things about maintaining an active interest in nature is knowing what the vegetables and fruits we grow in our gardens or get from the market actually looked like before our ancestors started breeding them. In many cases one wonders why they bothered; the rootstock of a wild carrot, shown here in fruit, is not actually that attractive-looking. But I guess one had to start somewhere, and if there isn't anything better...
But that just means we should be all the more grateful to our neolithic ancestors for painstakingly selecting crop plants generation after generation to be more palatable and productive.
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