Bird's Nest Weed

Here is another look at Wild Carrot, aka Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota. If all those names are not enough, today we'll use another--Bird's Nest Weed.

BNW is an alien biennial species with the carrot-like taproot forming the first year. I pulled up a second year plant that had already gone by--its taproot was all dried out. A first year root will be more like the carrot we know. At that time, it's more like a storage device.

From the Handbook of Nature Study:

"The wild carrot is known in some localities as the "bird's nest weed" because the maturing fruit clusters, their edges curving inward, look like little birds' nests."









I watched a very moving and inspirational The National Parks: America's Best Idea Episode 1 by Ken Burns while finishing up this post. See PBS for more information on this series.

Comstock, Anna Botsford. Handbook of Nature Study. New York, 1911. 544. Web. Google Book Search. 27 Sep 2009.

Wild Carrot

Here's the Wild Carrot, Daucus carota, also known as Queen Anne's lace. My neighbor mentioned that the flowers can be book pressed and coated with sparkles to make Christmas tree ornaments. Pretty cool, eh?


From Wikipedia:

"Like the cultivated carrot, the wild carrot root is edible while young, but quickly becomes too woody to consume. A teaspoon of crushed seeds has long been used as a form of natural birth control; its use for this purpose was first described by Hippocrates over 2,000 years ago. Research conducted on mice has offered a degree of confirmation for this use—it was found that wild carrot disrupts the implantation process, which reinforces its reputation as a contraceptive. Chinese studies have also indicated that the seeds block progesterone synthesis, which could explain this effect."
...

"Wild carrot was introduced and naturalised in North America, where it is often known as "Queen Anne's lace". It is so called because the flower resembles lace; the red flower in the center represents a blood droplet where Queen Anne pricked herself with a needle when she was making the lace. The function of the tiny red flower, coloured by anthocyanin, is to attract insects."


From Wild Flowers Worth Knowing:

"A pest to farmers, a joy to the flower-lover, and a welcome signal for refreshment to hosts of flies, beetles, bees, and wasps, especially to the paper-nest builders, the sprangly wild carrot lifts its fringy foliage and exquisite lacy blossoms above the dry soil of three continents. From Europe it has come to spread its delicate wheels over our summer landscape, until whole fields are whitened by them east of the Mississippi. Having proved fittest in the struggle for survival in the fiercer competition of plants in the over-cultivated Old World, it takes its course of empire westward year by year, finding most favorable conditions for colonizing in our vast, uncultivated area; and the less aggressive, native occupants of our soil are only too readily crowded out. Would that the advocates of unrestricted immigration of foreign peasants studied the parallel examples among floral invaders!

Still another fiction is that the cultivated carrot, introduced to England by the Dutch in Queen Elizabeth's reign, was derived from this wild species. Miller, the celebrated English botanist and gardener, among many others, has disproved this statement by utterly failing again and again to produce an edible vegetable from this wild root. When cultivation of the garden carrot lapses for a few generations, it reverts to the ancestral type—a species quite distinct from Daucus Carota."





"Daucus carota." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 17 Jun 2009, 15:11 UTC. 28 Jun 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daucus_carota&oldid=296968184>.

Blanchan, Neltje. Wild Flowers Worth Knowing. New York, 1917. 142-3. Web. Google Book Search. 28 Jun 2009.