Queen Anne's Lace

Order: Apiales

Family: Apiaceae

Genus: Daucus

Species: D. carota

Identifying Characteristics:

- Height: 1-3 feet

- Flower size: tiny, in clusters 3-5 inches across

- Flower color: white

- Daucus carota is a variable biennial plant, usually growing up to 1 m tall and flowering from June to August. The umbels are claret-coloured or pale pink before they open, then bright white and rounded when in full flower, measuring 3–7 cm wide with a festoon ofbracts beneath; finally, as they turn to seed, they contract and become concave like a bird's nest. The dried umbels detach from the plant, becoming tumbleweeds.

^{Special Adaptations:}

^{- Also known as the wild carrot}

- Like the cultivated carrot, the wild carrot root is edible while young, but quickly becomes toowoody to consume. A teaspoon of crushedseeds has long been used as a form of birth control

-This beneficial weed can be used as acompanion plant to crops. Like mostumbellifers it attracts predatory wasps to its small flowers in its native land; however, where it has been introduced it attracts only very few of such wasps . This species is also documented to boost tomato plant production when kept nearby, and it can provide amicroclimate of cooler, moister air for lettuce, when intercropped with it.

-Wild carrot was introduced and naturalised inNorth 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.

-the plant is amazingly abundant, growing in old fields and even along roadsides where more fastidious flora can't survive