Plant · P-615

Culantro

Eryngium foetidum

Culantro is a low, rosette-forming herb of the wet tropics with an aroma close to cilantro but several times more pungent, so a fraction of the quantity seasons a dish - fresh in sofrito, salsa, soups, curries and chutneys across the Caribbean, Latin America and southeast Asia. Unlike its relative, it actually wants shade: the deepest, most aromatic leaves come from plants grown under heavy shade, while full sun makes them small, pale and quick to bolt. It is frost-tender and killed outright by freezing, so it is grown as a warm-season annual or under cover wherever winters dip below freezing, persisting as a true perennial only where frost never reaches. Its flowers, left to open, draw beneficial insects, but only on plants allowed to bolt - which ends the leaf harvest, so shading it and cutting flower stalks as they rise is what keeps a planting productive.