Lovage comes from the eastern Mediterranean, where it has been cultivated as a food plant and remedy for centuries. The species name, officinale, marks it as a plant once sold in apothecaries, and every part of it has found its way into the kitchen: seeds into breads and cakes, leaves into soups and stews and herb teas, flowers tossed into salads, and even the thick, rhizomatous roots eaten or used as flavoring. The taste throughout is emphatically of celery, though richer and more complex than anything from the vegetable patch. At six feet tall with a three-foot spread, it is not a plant that disappears into a border.

It grows best in deep, fertile, consistently moist soil in full sun to partial shade, and benefits from regular pruning through the growing season to keep fresh leaves coming. Old foliage can be cut back in late fall. The plant spreads by underground rhizomes and has escaped cultivation in parts of New England, so harvesting seeds regularly is a sensible precaution where self-seeding would be unwanted. For the kitchen gardener with space, though, Lovage is one of the most productive and useful perennials available, offering harvests from early spring through late autumn.