The cultivated carrot belongs to the genus Daucus L . This genus contains a great variety of wild forms . These grow mostly in the Mediterranean areas and in South West Asia, but some representatives are found in tropical Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the American continents .
As far as known cultivated forms have only been derived from the species Daucus carota L . Classification of the wild forms of this species is difficult because of a more or less continuous variation in the material . But THELLUNG (20) classifies them in two groups (eucarota and gummiferi) each consisting of five main types (subspecies) . Plants of the group eucarota are mostly annuals or biennials ; this group comprises the subspecies maritimus, carota, maior, sativus (cultivated carrot), and maximus. Plants of the group gummiferi are often perennials but they die after flowering once ; this group includes the subspecies commutatis, hispanicus, fontanesii, bocconei and gummifer .
Daucus carota s .sp . carota is the commonest wild carrot of Europe and S .W . Asia . Once it was generally thought to be the direct source of the cultivated carrot . In the last century an experiment was recorded, in which, in a few generations, a cultivated carrot was bred from seeds collected from wild plants . But in other experiments this result was not obtained, if the wild seeds were collected in an area where previous hybridization between the wild plants and cultivated carrots was excluded (16, . So it must be concluded that in the first mentioned experiment the wild plants which, after selection produced a cultivated form, did so only because they themselves had previously been hybridized in nature with cultivated carrots . As the wild type of root is dominant over the cultivated type, the difference between a wild plant and a hybrid is not evident . THELLUNG (34, 35) has suggested that it is much more probable that the cultivated carrot has developed from a crossing between D . carota s .sp . carota and D . carota s .sp .