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Anthriscus cerefolium
Also called Garden chervil, Salad Chervil
Chervil is a delicate annual herb related to parsley, grown for its fresh, mild-flavoured leaves. It thrives in cool, moist conditions and bolts (flowers and goes to seed) quickly in heat, so it is best grown as a cool-season crop.
Chervil (; Anthriscus cerefolium), sometimes called French parsley or garden chervil (to distinguish it from similar plants also called chervil), is a delicate annual herb related to parsley. It was formerly called myrhis due to its volatile oil with an aroma similar to the resinous substance myrrh. It is commonly used to season mild-flavoured dishes and is a constituent of the French herb mixture fines herbes.
Transplanting chervil can be difficult, due to the long taproot. It prefers a cool and moist location; otherwise, it rapidly goes to seed (also known as bolting). It is usually grown as a cool-season crop, like lettuce, being planted in early spring and late fall or in a winter greenhouse. Regular harvesting of leaves also reduces bolting. If plants bolt despite precautions, new seeds can be periodically re-sown throughout the growing season, thus producing fresh plants as older plants bolt and go out of production.
A member of the Apiaceae, the native distribution of chervil is uncertain due to its long history of cultivation, particularly by the Romans. The New Oxford Book of Food Plants limits its native range to the Caucasus, while Plants of the World Online cites it with a wider native range across central and southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia from Switzerland in the west, to Iran in the east.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Chervil by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
Pet safety from the ASPCA toxic and non-toxic plant lists.
