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What kind of plant is this? In Spanish it’s called llareta, and it’s a member of the Apiaceaefamily, which makes it a cousin to parsley, carrots and fennel. But being a desert plant, high up in Chile’s extraordinarily dry Atacama, it grows very, very slowly — a little over a centimeter a year.

At that rate, plants rising to shoulder height (covering yards of ground, lump after lump) must be really, really old. In fact, some of them are older than the Giant Sequoias of California, older than towering redwoods. In Chile, many of them go back 3,000 years — well before the Golden Age of Greece.

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