With a strong taste and smell, they make salads with a special flavor. This plant is aquatic. It breeds in streams or springs of wells. In our town we can find them in the rivers Búrdalo and Burdalillo, Canchaleja, Veneritos and in some streams and springs, depending on the amount of rain each year. Be careful not to confuse it with hemlock, whose root is poisonous.
Harvesting: winter-spring
Description of Apium nodiflorum
Apium nodiflorum is a perennial and glabrous herb. Stems with prostrate and rooting lower nodes, but erect in the rest, fistulous and finely asurtate. Leaves are once pinnatisect, with three to thirteen lanceolate or ovate, serrate or crenulate, often somewhat lobed and sessile and paired segments. The umbels are compound, opposite the leaves, have three to fifteen rays, subequal, with peduncles, much shorter than the rays, sometimes nonexistent. Exceptionally it has one or two bracts and usually none. The umbellules have radii of 1-2 mm in fruiting. The bractéolas are linear-lanceolate to ovate and usually as long as the flowers or longer. The calyx has no teeth. The petals are whitish green. The styles, in fruiting, are somewhat longer than the stylepodium and are recurved. The fruits are ovoid and with narrow commissure; the mericarps have thick and prominent ribs.
It is a weed that grows in a wide variety of wetland habitats generally in neutral, nutrient-rich soils, such as the margins of rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, canals and ditches, as well as in marshy meadows and anthropogenic habitats such as gravel pits and is a good indicator of water purity as it does not grow if it is eutrophicated.
Uses of Apium nodiflorum
Apium nodiflorum was used as a vegetable in salads and cooked and in traditional medicine as an excitant, antiscorbutic, remineralizing, vitamin and diuretic.
Other common names of the Apium nodiflorum
Parsley, celery, celery, celery, celery, celery, celery, celery border, celery board, celery, celery, celery, celery, celery, wild celery, wild celery, barracuda, cress, cress, cress, cress, watercress, watercress, watercress, watercress, watercress, cress, cress, cresses, creixen, fieras, labaza, rabasca and rabaza.
