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|texte=One of the most important root vegetable plants, cultivated worldwide, mainly in temperate climates, but also in the subtropics and tropics as a cool season crop. Main producers: China, USA, Russia. The swollen taproots eaten raw or cooked and processed for canning, freezing, dehydration and juice manufacture. Orange-rooted carrots, a rich source of sugars, vitamins A and C and fibres, important in the nutrition of infants and used industrially for the extraction of the provitamin A β-carotene until 1947 when synthetic sources became possible. Also employed as a fodder crop (roots, leaves), medicinal plant (roots, fruits), and for cosmetic purposes. Two main groups of cultivated carrot are recognized as D. carota subsp. sativus var. atrorubens Alef. (eastern or anthocyanin carrot) and Daucus carota subsp. sativus var. sativus (western or carotene carrot). The eastern carrots, often with purple anthocyanin root pigmentation, apparently originated in the Afghanistan centre of diversity. Their cultivation in Asiatic countries has been largely replaced today by orange, carotenoid pigmented western carrots. Japanese red carrots are believed to have arisen by crossing between purplish Afghan and orange western carrots. After comparison of the arguments of various highly speculative theories regarding the origin of western carrot, Heywood (1983) postulated its selection from a genepool involving cultivated yellow-rooted eastern carrots, cultivated white-rooted derivatives of ''Daucus carota'' subsp. ''carota'' grown as medicinal plants since classical times and wild unselected populations of adjacent ''D. carota'' subspecies in Europe and the Mediterranean. Nevertheless cultivation of carrot in ancient times is much disputed. Eastern carrot probably spread via Northern Africa to Spain in the 12th cent. and to Western and Central Europe until the 14th cent. They reached China in the 14th and Japan in the 17th cent. Dutch landraces of the 17th cent. were the basis for the orange western carrot cultivars predominantly grown at present.
|auteur =Mansfeld.
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