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WILD CARROT QUEEN ANNE'S LACE BIRD'SNEST
(Daucus Carota) Carrot family
Flowers - Small, of unequal sizes (polygamous), white, rarely
pinkish gray, 5-parted, in a compound, flat, circular umbel, the
central floret often dark crimson; the umbels very concave in
fruit. An involucre of narrow, pinnately cut bracts. Stem: 1 to 3
ft. high, with stiff hairs; from a deep, fleshy, conic root.
Leaves: Cut into fine, fringy divisions; upper ones smaller and
less dissected.
Preferred Habitat - Wastelands, fields, roadsides. Flowering
Season - June-September.
Distribution - Eastern half of United States and Canada. Europe
and Asia.
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!
What is the secret of the wild carrots' triumphal march? As
usual, it is to be sought chiefly in the flower's scheme to
attract and utilize visitors. Nectar being secreted in open disks
near to one another, the shortest-tongued insects can lick it up
from the Umbelliferae with even less loss of time than from the
tubular florets of the Cornpositae. Over sixty distinct species
of insects may be taken on the wild carrot by any amateur, since
it blooms while insect life is at its height but, as might be
expected, the long-tongued and color-loving, specialized bees and
butterflies do not often waste time on florets so easily drained
by the mob. Ants find the stiff hairs on the stem disagreeable
obstacles to pilfering; but no visitors seem to object to the
flowers' suffocating odor.
One of these lacy, white umbels must be examined under a lens
before its delicate structure and perfection of detail can be
appreciated. Naturally a visitor is attracted first by the
largest, most showy florets situated around the outer edge of the
wheel, on which he leaves pollen, brought from another umbel; and
any vitalizing dust remaining on his under side may be left on
the less conspicuous hermaphrodite blossoms as he makes his way
toward the center, where the tiny, pollen-bearing florets are
grouped. From the latter, as he flies away, he will carry fresh
pollen to the outer row of florets on another umbel, and so on -
at least this is the usual and highly advantageous method. After
general fertilization, the slender flower-stalks curl inward, and
the umbel forms a hollow nest that gradually contracts as it
dries, almost, if not quite, closing at the top, albeit the
fiction that bees and spiders make their home in the seeding
umbels circulates freely.
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.
Next: SMOOTHER SWEET CICELY
Previous: AMERICAN SPIKENARD INDIAN ROOT SPIGNET
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