Health & Fitness
Queen Anne's Lace - Our Delicate and Beautiful Wild Carrot
Queen Anne's Lace is the wild carrot that led to our modern cultivated varieties and smells like the carrots we eat. But don't be deceived by the smell, it tastes like a carrot-flavored 2' x 4'.
Queen Anne's Lace is flowering everywhere now with its beautiful white lace-like flowers and frilly leaves. It is a hallmark of summer as it sways in the wind above the other meadow grasses and wildflowers. Queen Anne's Lace is actually the wild precursor to our cultivated carrots. The root is white and branching unlike the modern orange varieties and smells just like a carrot. It even tastes like one, except that it is as woody as a wall stud.* Like so many of our wildflowers, it is a European species that was likely brought to this country inadvertently with European settlers as they transferred plants and other things to the New World. Like many weeds, once it became established it spread everywhere and now graces our meadows and roadsides and open abandoned spaces.
The flowers like the name implies are like lace and are well worth a close look. The very center of the flower is red, and is believed to attract insects to the otherwise all-white flower. I've read that the leaves can be irritating to some people, although I've touched the plant many times without any reaction. They are frilly just like the leaves of our cultivated carrots. Black swallowtail butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves and the plant in turn serves as the food for the caterpillars.
If you look at the flower, it's very easy to see why it has the common name "lace". But according to Wikipedia, the "Queen Anne" part of the name is derived from the red flower in the center and supposedly represents a blood droplet where Queen Anne pricked herself with a needle when she was making the lace.
Find out what's happening in East Brunswickfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
A very easy place to see Queen Anne's Lace right now is in the large grassy meadow behind the East Brunswick Performing Arts Center on Cranbury Road. It is flowering throughout the meadow in all its summertime glory and is well worth a look as its white frilly flowers sway in the breeze.
*Note that there is a similar looking very poisonous plant, Poison Hemlock, but it is a swamp species and does not occur in upland fields like Queen Anne's Lace.
