WILD CARROT (Queen Anne's Lace) 

 Daucus carota L. 



June - August It is June and a meadowlark sings in the wheat. On 

 Roadsides, fields bowed wings he flits with a harsh sputtering and a 



flashing of white tail feathers to a fencepost across 

 the field. Into the sunshine he thrusts his golden bosom with its great 

 black A^ inked into it, so that he glints in his pride as he sings over and 

 over again. Beneath him along the fence row are the flat rosettes of 

 snowy Queen Anne's lace or wild carrot, emblem of June. It has delicate 

 clusters of tiny ofl-center flowers with a single maroon floweret uniquely 

 set in the center of the cluster. Meadowlarks and Queen Anne's lace — 

 these are part of June. 



Wild carrot is a weed brought over from Europe. It is a pest when 

 it gets into crop fields, and is then vigorously called devil's weed by 

 farmers who find it difficult to eradicate. Old fields which lie fallow for 

 a year or so may grow up in wild carrot until the landscape is white. 

 Along roadsides and in waste places, the carrot is no longer a pest but 

 is one of the most ornamental fiowers of the summer. 



The plants range in height from one to four feet with hairy stems 

 which grow from a deep carrot root. The leaves are fern-like and deeply 

 cut, and the flower heads are often four inches wide, composed of many 

 thin spokes which terminate in a small cluster of flowers. The entire 

 group makes a broad, lacy, intricate umbel. AVhen the seeds begin to form, 

 the thin flower stems in the umbel cun'e toward the center so that the 

 seed-head resembles a ])ird's nest. During the summer the carrot plants 

 have flowers and seed-heads in all stages of development, until they are 

 ended by the coming of heavy frost. 



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