On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Pat Meadows wrote:
|Cilantro and parsley are not only different *species* they
|are in different genuses.
|
|Parsley is _Petroselinum crispum_ .
|
|Cilantro is _Coriandrum sativum_ .
|
|So they are not very closely related. They are in the same
|family: the _Apiaceae_ .

Aha! Thanks, you guys are great!

|I can't offhand think of any particular reason why anyone
|would WANT a parsley/cilantro cross.

It would be nice if there were a parsley with a slightly different
flavor.

|BTW, you can't bypass Darwin and Mendel...they didn't come
|up with wild surmises, but worked out and elucidated some of
|the laws of natu how things actually work in the real
|world.
|
|I suppose you could make a GMO cross: gentically-engineered
|cross - gene splicing. But again: why would you WANT to?

There are lots of reasons why a person might want to create
new plants never seen before. Curiosity sometimes is its own
reason for doing things, but I suppose there are more practical
reasons for doing things. For instance, a higher concentration
of oils in the leaves (or even the roots or bulbs) is a good
reason for creating a hybrid. Different colors of leaves or
flowers is also a good reason for creating a hybrid, especially
if you anticipate marketing the product to small scale home
gardeners that like to mix as many of their plants into the
same plot as possible.