History and Lore

Grown in temperate regions around the world, Daucus carota includes a number of both cultivated and wild varieties. Although orange carrots are the most familiar, you can also find white, yellow, purple, and deep violet Asian roots. Most scholars agree that the first carrots, with branched purple roots, originated in Afghanistan and spread eastward to India, China, and Japan, and also westward into Arab-occupied Spain in the twelfth century and then through continental Europe in the fourteenth century. The carrots cultivated in northwestern Europe before and during the sixteenth century were all long, tapered purple or yellow roots. In the seventeenth century, horticulturists in the Netherlands hybridized the bright orange color, which became the favored type.