Consider-the-Lilies Web Gallery
Queen Anne's Lace
"A pest to farmers, a joy to the flower-lover...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."
Thus was this beauty described by one early botanist.
Along with the dandelion, this is one flower most everyone has seen gracing the fields or roadsides in the heat of summer.
Known as Wild Carrot and Birds Nest in some parts of the United States, Queen Anne's Lace is indeed a member of the carrot family, and may or may not have been the original plant from which our table carrots were developed.
(Like a number of areas in botany, I've learned, especially for plants in use since ancient times, not every view is universally endorsed, and opposing positions are sometimes expressed with great vehemence!)
As a layman, I'll just say that the question remains open and pass along one more or less neutral commentator's observation: "The first man to eat the wild carrot must have been really hungry, because it is like eating a piece of wood."
It appears that the shape of either the emerging flower head or the end of the season form could have led to Queen Anne's Lace being dubbed Bird's Nest Plant. But, although it does resemble a nest, only a hummingbird could fit into either the spring or fall coiled umbel.
But it is the mid-season stage that we notice most often, as the roadsides and fields are "whitened" by this summer beauty. They are indeed a pretty sight at a distance, but looking more closely, we can see...
The attractive stark white "flower" of the plant— called an umbel for its shape by botanists—is comprised of a mass of tiny, individual flowers.
The flowers vary in size and shading from the edge to the center of the umbel—from pure white at the edge, through a creamy white, and then the smaller pink-white florets in the center of the array.
Out of curiosity, I divided one umbel into a section and counted the number of flowers, then multiplied that by the total number of sections.
I came up with approximately 500 florets in each Queen Anne's Lace umbel.
Using the same method I did a count of the plants in a 10'x10' plot in some nearby fields.
I calculated that there are 9,000 umbels—averaging two per plant—per acre, or more than 4,500,000 florets blanketing each acre of just one field!
But the duration of the "whitening" of the meadow with the profuse beauty of Queen Anne's Lace can be counted in days, as this short-lived biennial begins to die back.
Although more beautiful "than Solomon in all his glory," as Jesus said, this lily too will soon close for a final time. The snowy white flowers are replaced by seed capsules colored first in shades of maroon and finally in brown.
Here are the seeds that have the potential for producing new Queen Anne's Lace flowers in the spring two years hence.
And so the cycle of Grace continues.
Go to the Main Directory to consider more lilies of the field.