'Bishop' Celery (Reselection Project)

Apium graveolens

Origin: Salinas, California

Improvement status: Cultivar

Seeds per packet: ~100

Germination tested 01/2026: 87%

Life cycle: Biennial 

This is something of a re-introduction of a 1970s commercial variety of celery bred in California by the long-since defunct John Moran Seed Co., of Salinas. We got these seeds from the USDA's National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), where they've most been chilling in the collection since 1983. But these seeds are unlikely to be truly representative of what the variety was like in 1983. For one thing, the NPGS seeds we received had poor germination (which is often the case with stored umbel seed as it ages), so we only ended up with only around ten plants. Thankfully they all matured, even after being dug out of open ground and put into a high-tunnel for winter — but their seeds still represent a genetic bottleneck (I'd be more comfortable with at least 20 plants for a celery crop, or — better yet — 50 plants). For another thing, we also had far from optimal growing conditions for really evaluating a celery population, so even if we had seen better germination, it still would have been hard to know for sure if the variety is in good shape or not, simply because we didn't give them a chance to fully express their full potential. However, it was nevertheless clear enough that the plants were not uniform at all (some had darker leaves, size and form varied between plants, etc), so it's clear the population needs some work.

Thankfully, we have at least a bit of a guide as to how to re-select something close to the original 'Bishop' — the original narrative description that came with the variety when it was donated to the USDA: "Tall Utah 52-70 R type with longer petioles than traditional tall Utah types. Good green coloring." Burpee still offers 'Tall Utah 52-70 R', and they say it has 11-inch petioles (that's the part of celery we mainly eat), so we know we're looking for petioles longer than 11 inches.

It's never very surprising when USDA seed gets crossed up or degraded, because every grow-out offers another chance for something to go wrong — and things inevitably do go wrong. Over its 40+ years in the system, 'Bishop' was likely grown at least two or three times, and possibly more. Even if technicians were able to keep it fully isolated from any other celery (which is challenging, even with isolation cages, because many of the insect pollinators that are attracted to celery are extremely small), it's unlikely they would have had time to perform what the best seed companies consider routine variety maintainance on 'Bishop' — namely culling underperforming plants and other outliers and rogues. More likely, because the Northeast Regional Plant Introducion Station in Geneva, New York, where 'Bishop' is maintained, has long been understaffed and underfunded (even before the budget cuts and mass firings of the second Trump administration), and its technicians are responsible for maintaining a system with over 20,000 accessions of over 300 species, they probably just save whatever they can from each grow-out, without evaluating each plant to make sure the population remains true to its original description. I may be wrong, but many years of working on regenerating NPGS accessions has led me to this conclusion. Variety maintainance is particularly necessary for crops in the Apiaceae family, which often revert to wilder forms without active selection in basically every generation (as evidence, note the presence of wild fennel, wild parsnip, wild carrot — or Queen Anne's Lace — which have escaped cultivation and become feral species well-established across various American landscapes whose stems or roots have little resemblance to the crops they once were.

All that is to say: we hope you will help us in this re-selection process. With a crop from another family, we might not even bother, but Apiaceae crops are quite malleable, even over a short time, so we're confident that if someone with experience growing celery takes an interest in these seeds, they'll be able to reselect something at least closely approximating it within a few generations. As inspiration, we can look to the story of 'The Student' parsnip: Professor James Buckman of the Royal Agricultural College (RAC) in England, was a correspondent and colleague of Charles Darwin, who in 1847 (a dozen years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published) set out to demonstrate that he could use wild plants to develop a new, uniform, superior cultivar of parsnip. He collected wild parsnip seeds from the Cotswolds and set about working with subsequent generations in the gardens of the RAC at Cirencester. Some reports state that he bred it strictly from the wild plants, while others say he backcrossed his wild selections with existing cultivars, but it nevertheless proves the point about malleability, because by 1859 (the same year Origin of Species came out) Buckman had sold the variety to Suttons, a London seedhouse, and they released it under the name 'The Student.' It proved so popular — and stable — that it can still be found offered by a variety of seed companies today.

Other seed companies probably wouldn't dream of putting these messy 'Bishop' seeds out there, but we're not other seed companies. With the NPGS severely understaffed and under constant threat of budget cuts and firings, it's all the more important to get whatever we can out of the government's seed banks and into peoples' hands. It's entirely possible that the next person who seeks to request 'Bishop' from the USDA, maybe in a year or two (or five or ten), might find them no longer making it available, or might plant the seeds they receive and find an even lower germination rate, or maybe even none at all. Additionally, because celery is one of the common vegetables of which there is very little genetic diversity widely available in the US seed market (indeed, most companies only offer the same handful of cultivars), any addition of genetics into the wider genepool is a service to long-term food security. So we're putting them out there, even in this messy form. And we hope some of you will adopt them — and please be in touch with us if you do.

A NOTE ON SEED INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION: The history of the company that bred this celery, the John Moran Seed Company, is an object lesson in seed industry consolidation, which is a major threat to agrobiodiversity around the world (because every lost seed company means less crop biodiversity available to farmers). Founded in 1963 as John Moran Seed Company, it became Moran Seeds, Inc. in 1968. In 1976, a major US chemical company called Celanese decided to enter the seed business with their acquisition of a company called Ramsey Seed. The following year they acquired Moran Seeds, and the next year Harris Seeds. They soon began combining the two. In 1985, a Franco-Belgian conglomerate called Lafarge Coppée S.A (itself born of the union of the French industrial giant Lafarge — a cement, construction aggregates, and concrete company — with the Belgian coal, coke, and fertilizer company Coppée) purchased all Moran and Harris assets from Celanese and finished their consolidation into Harris Moran. Eleven years later, in 1996, the French multinational Groupe Limagrain purchased Harris Moran from Lafarge Coppée, and the following year consolidated it with their Ferry-Morse Seed operations (itself born of the 1930 merger of Ferry & Co. and Morse Seeds). So now what was once a small seed company in Salinas, California, is now part of a massive global congolmerate headquartered in France. And crops they once developed and stewarded, like 'Bishop' celery, only exist in seedbanks (if at all).

This seed was grown by EFN co-founder Nate Kleinman in collaboration with our friends at The Seed Farm at Princeton University. The plants were grown in the open their first year, then dug up and brought into a high-tunnel to overwinter and flower. That spring and early summer, their flowers were a veritable smorgasbord for all manner of flying insects from wasps to bees to flies (see photos).

GROWING TIPS: Start celery in flats a few weeks before last frost. Plant out seedlings once all danger of frost has passed. Space plants a foot apart. As plants mature, you can mound up soil around them to blanch the lower parts of the petioles. Celery is a biennial, so it will not flower and set seed until the second year.