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From most accounts, asparagus has its origins in the Middle East. There, it can still be found among the sandy slopes of dunes and on the soggy sand of river valleys. These are the places from where it spread to Western and Central Europe and to the Maghreb.

There are many varieties of asparagus (approx. 100), but gourmets value certainly most our home-grown cultivar Asparagus officinalis.

Already 4000 years ago, the Chinese were familiar with asparagus and it must have made their mouth water. Pharaoh Ikhnaton and his wife Nefertiti declared asparagus the food of the gods. Even the Greek, Persians and Babylonians liked the tasty plant.

Ancient Romans were particularly taken with asparagus Cato was said to be much infatuated with the long and straight spears. The detailed description of asparagus he delivered in his “De agricultura,” a book written in 150 before Christ, is proof of that. The Mediterranean people of these times knew about a wild-growing asparagus with rather thin spears (Asparagus acutifolius). The variety we have begun to cultivate in Germany (Asparagus officinalis) has arrived Italy at a later point in time.

In his book, Cato was the first to provide instructions on how to grow the plant in a garden. Among the topics he held forth about were the raising of young plants, sowing time, duration and methods of harvesting, fertilization, weed control and the removal of the dried fern of the asparagus.

Murals found in Pompeii pictured asparagus. It is said to be considered a fine delicacy. Emperor Diocletian of the 4th century has felt obliged to issue an ordinance fixing a maximum price for asparagus. Quite some time later, around 1100, Byzantine physicians first mentioned it as a medical plant. That is from where it derived the name of Asparagus officinalis. They emphasized the diuretic effect of asparagus and used the plant to kill pains in the hip. Already at this time asparagus, which the Romans dedicated to Venus, was seen as an aphrodisiac.

Asparagus was discovered as delicious vegetable already around the mid-fifteen century, when cloisters and courts began to grow fine vegetables to get some relief from the everyday drag of the unbalanced diet.
The cultivation of asparagus has spread through much of Europe by the end of the sixteenth century. It included France and Italy as much as it did England, Eastern Europe and Germany. The German asparagus-growing regions included particularly the area around Braunschweig, the Baden area, the surroundings of Berlin, Hamburg and Riga.

In 1804, the Frenchman Apert had first the idea to preserve asparagus. German manufacturers began in 1840 with the canning of asparagus. Eventually, in 1861 the Braunschweig manufacturer of canned food, Gustav Grahe, encouraged gardeners and farmers to “grow asparagus in a large scale” and committed his company to buy their harvested crops, which has made the growth of asparagus soar in this region.
While the acreage around Braunschweig was 125 ha in 1874, it climbed to 3500 ha in 1913. It was in 1885, when Braunschweig’s asparagus farmer first established a joint–stock company for asparagus (“Spargel AG”) to allow them to make the most of their members’ products. 50 percent of the cultivation area of this time belonged to the members of the Spargel AG. Back then, this organization of producers focused entirely on the supply of manufactories of canned food.

Germany has two major asparagus-growing areas. One is the Northern German area, which spreads from Braunschweig to Hannover, Osnabrück and Münster up to the North Sea and Elbe, and the other, which covers the Southern German regions around Schrobenhausen, Schwetzingen, Darmstadt and Ingelheim.
But the many smaller cultivation areas, such as Walbeck at the Lower Rhine, provide us with excellent asparagus as well. At the initiative of the local “asparagus major” Dr. Klein-Walbeck, locals set up a cooperative for asparagus-growers in 1929. He had found the sandy soils of Walbeck an excellent basis for the cultivation of asparagus. Already in 1930 numerous widely-read newspapers reported about the new branch of agriculture in Walbeck at the Lower Rhine. Not before long, and thanks to the strict control of quality, the fine produce of Walbeck attained the highest pricing levels.