Levisticum officinale
Lovage is a stout perennial in the carrot family with a concentrated celery-like aroma. It is native to southwestern Asia and perhaps the Mediterranean, then spread through Europe before settling into gardens farther north.1
In New England it persists as a garden herb and occasional escape in fields, gardens, and waste areas, which makes it one of those old culinary plants that feels half cultivated and half feral once you start noticing it.2 The leaf is the familiar seasoning, but older European use treated the plant more broadly: the stalks were blanched, boiled, or braised like celery and could also be candied like angelica.1
That older whole-plant use helps explain why lovage tastes more structural than decorative. It can stand in for celery in soups and stews, but it does so with a darker, more resinous edge that behaves almost like a seasoning concentrate rather than a green vegetable.3 A little is usually enough, which is part of the ingredient’s appeal: it gives a broth or cream base a deep herb-and-stalk flavor without needing a whole mirepoix to get there.
New Hampshire Extension describes lovage as a hardy perennial alternative to celery, especially useful where celery is difficult to grow reliably. It can reach three to six feet, prefers full sun and moist loamy soil, and sends up flat-topped yellow flower clusters typical of the carrot family.4 The hollow stems, glossy leaves, roots, and seeds are all edible, although the leaves are the part most often treated as a seasoning. That combination of durability and whole-plant usefulness is why lovage can remain in a Northeast garden for years while still behaving like a serious food crop rather than merely an ornamental herb.
Its celery resemblance is chemical as well as visual. The plant’s aroma comes from concentrated volatile compounds in the leaves and stems, so bruising or chopping releases a sharper celery-like scent; drying intensifies the seasoning effect while removing the watery quality that makes fresh lovage seem more vegetable-like.34
Footnotes
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 166 (PDF p. 201). ↩ ↩2
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Arthur Haines, New England Wild Flower Society’s Flora Novae Angliae (Yale University Press, 2011), PDF p. 378. ↩
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Pat Curran, “Perennial Herbs,” Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County and Cornell Botanic Gardens, March 2017. ↩ ↩2
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University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, “Extending the season and overwintering garden veggies, winter sowing, lovage, and putting the garden to bed,” accessed September 4, 2026. ↩ ↩2