Petroselinum crispum Seeds | Double Curled Parsley
LATIN NAME: Petroselinum crispum
COMMON NAME: Double Curled Parsley
Plant Profile
The curl is a single genetic trait run to extremes: every leaflet’s margin rolls and frills until the leaf reads as a green pompom rather than a blade. Breeders pushed the trait for texture and for the way a frill holds a droplet of dressing on a plate. In the garden the same frills trap soil splash after rain, so lift the crowns on a little grit mulch if the bed is heavy.
The reliable test is not shape but smell: crush any leaf. True parsley smells fresh and sweet-green, faintly of celery; Aethusa smells rank and mouse-like, and its leaf surfaces are shinier beneath. Learn that one sniff and the whole umbel family becomes safer to garden with.
Like all Petroselinum crispum, this is a biennial: the first year builds the rosette and a deep taproot, winter vernalizes the crown, and the second year runs up the flower stalk, the greenish-yellow umbels and the ribbed grey-brown seed. Cutting into the crown’s centre shortens the leaf phase, so cut from the outside and leave the heart working.
Young parsley competes poorly, so keep the seedbed clean while plants are small. Slugs graze new crowns after rain — a grit collar or a torch-lit patrol settles them. Leaf-mining fly larvae thread pale tunnels through mature blades in some districts; removing affected leaves at the first tunnel and meshing the row keeps the damage cosmetic. Aphids arrive late and leave with a firm hose jet. None of these trouble an edging row cut twice as often, since regular cutting removes both pest habitat and the ageing foliage pests prefer.
Science & Biotechnology
Parsley leaf is loaded with flavone glycosides, and the signature one — apiin, named for the celery genus Apium — was first worked out in this family’s plants. Alongside it the leaf carries luteolin and apigenin derivatives and one of the highest vitamin K contents of any common green, which is why parsley moved long ago from garnish to ingredient in salads and green drinks.
Parsley earned a second life in the laboratory: its cell-suspension cultures became a textbook system for studying how plants switch on phenylpropanoid and furanocoumarin defences when challenged with fungal elicitors, work that shaped how plant biologists think about induced immunity. The curled garnish on the plate and the shaken flask on the bench are the same genome.
Uses & Benefits
The frilled types found a second career in the ornamental garden. Victorian gardeners planted curly parsley into carpet bedding and along kitchen-garden paths, where its dense, weather-resistant mound read as foliage design rather than food. That habit survives in modern gardens for a good reason: an edging row of Double Curled is cuttable, decorative and cheap to renew from the same packet of seed.
Growing from Seed
Curled leaf chops coarser than flat, so use it where texture counts: scattered over boiled potatoes, folded into parsley butter for fish, or — the Levantine trick — fried briefly in olive oil until crisp and used as a garnish that survives the plate. The classic French persillade of parsley and garlic works with frilled leaf too; just dry it thoroughly first, since wet frills steam instead of sizzle.
Sow about 6 mm deep in a fertile, well-drained bed, rows 30 cm apart, after soaking the seed in warm water to speed the slow emergence. Thin at two true leaves, then to 15 cm between plants. Double Curled also makes a superb edging: set it 12 cm apart along a path and cut it like a miniature hedge all season.
A cloche or a dry mulch carries the crown through hard winters in most temperate gardens; the plant is hardy to well below freezing under snow. In spring, either lift the bolting plants or let one stand set seed and save it — open-pollinated strains come acceptably true for the kitchen row.
Our Take
I edge a salad bed with Double Curled every year and eat it as much as I look at it. Compare the Mosscurled Parsley seed Petroselinum strain for an even tighter frill, or the Forest Green Parsley Petroselinum seed page for the winter-curl standard; the general Parsley seed listing covers the wider range.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Double Curled Parsley: