This is the time of year when Queen Anne’s Lace flowers in drifts of white across the open fields and along the roadsides of the Berkshires. An immigrant from Europe, this biennial was supposedly named for Queen Anne of Great Britain. The pinpoint of purply red at the center of each white flower is said to represent the droplet of blood left by Queen Anne when she pricked herself making lace. It’s a pretty name, in any case, and a nice story, and I hope nothing is taken away from the romance of it to report that the “droplet of blood” is actually a pigment called anthocyanin which acts as an insect magnet.
Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is also called “Wild Carrot” and is considered by many to be edible in its first year of life. The Romans ate it as a vegetable and the American Colonists boiled the taproots in wine. Its sugar content is second only to that of the beet among root vegetables, and it’s been used as a sweetener in various cultures around the world. I mention this not to suggest you immediately start working Queen Anne’s Lace into your diet (in fact several similar-looking plants are quite poisonous), but as a way of trying to mitigate the plant’s designation as an invasive and “noxious” weed.
It’s true that it isn’t native to this country and that its tiny seeds, spread by the wind, root quickly across the uncultivated landscape. But some animals have benefitted from its arrival, caterpillars of the Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly eat the leaves, while bees drink its nectar. And what could be prettier than a bank of Queen Anne’s Lace growing wild along a country lane? To my mind this common wildflower with its fern-like fronds and frothy, intricate flower heads is as beautiful as the most prized perennial. The great American poet William Carlos Williams appears to have felt the same way. Here’s a poem of his on the subject.QUEEN ANNE’S LACE Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth—nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand’s span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over— or nothing.
For more poems by William Carlos Williams please visit: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-carlos-williams