Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare, is a tall aromatic plant of the carrot family with a sweet anise scent, cultivated for its seed, leaf and swollen leaf-base. Its classical associations are unusually rich. The giant fennel, Ferula, a related plant with a pithy stalk that smoulders slowly, is the reed in which the Titan Prometheus is said to have carried stolen fire down from heaven to humankind; and the plain of Marathon, where the Athenians won their famous victory, takes its name from the Greek marathon, fennel, for the plant that grew there.
In colonial New England fennel and dill seeds together were nicknamed meetin' seeds, carried to Sunday service and chewed through the long Puritan sermon to still hunger and drowsiness without visibly eating, a small and specific piece of American religious social history distinct from the herb's older Mediterranean uses. Wild fennel, finocchio selvatico, remains a defining flavour of Sicilian and southern Italian cooking, used well beyond the cultivated bulb vegetable that shares the name, a reminder that several quite different plants and plant parts, leaf, seed, pollen and swollen stem, all travel under the single word fennel.
Fennel is also one of the three core botanicals, alongside wormwood and anise, that define absinthe, the notorious green spirit of nineteenth-century France, a modern drink resting on exactly the same aromatic seed prized by Puritan New England for entirely different, sober reasons.