Queen Anne's Lace

The wild carrot: a froth of white lace with one dark floret at its heart, superb for beneficial insects - and the plant whose look-alikes, poison hemlock and water hemlock, kill people every year. Grow it in a bed you control, and learn the hairy-stem test before you go near a wild one.

Direct-sow in autumn into poor, sharply drained ground in full sun. It makes a rosette the first year and flowers the second, then dies - and where you put it matters far more than how you grow it.

Queen Anne's lace is easy to the point of being hard to stop. Direct-sow where it is to grow — the taproot resents transplanting — scattering seed on raked soil and raking it in barely ¼ inch. Autumn sowing is best: winter cold breaks the seed's dormancy and you get even germination in spring. A spring sowing works too, coming up in two to three weeks once soil holds above about 60°F.

Give it full sun and poor, sharply drained ground. This is a plant of gravel banks and neglected fields; rich soil and generous water give you soft, floppy, oversized plants that fall over. It wants no fertilizer at all and, once up, essentially no water. Thin to about 10 inches.

It is a strict biennial: year one is a flat rosette of finely divided, carrot-scented leaves; year two is a branched 2- to 4-foot stem carrying the umbels; then the plant dies. Sow in two consecutive years if you want flowers every season rather than alternate ones.

Where you put it matters more than how you grow it. Keep it out of vegetable and herb beds. It crosses with carrots left for seed, it is a wild reservoir for carrot rust fly, and — the point that outranks both — it puts a white-umbelled carrot-family plant in the middle of ground you gather food from. A dedicated pollinator strip, a meadow patch, or a cutting bed well away from the vegetable garden is the right home for it.

One job that matters: cut the umbels before they curl shut into seed heads. Otherwise it needs nothing - no feeding, no watering, no staking in an open site - beyond gloves and sleeves when you cut it.

Established plants ask for essentially nothing. Do not water a settled stand and do not feed it; both produce weak, leggy growth that flops in the first storm. In an open, sunny site it does not need staking; in a sheltered or rich one it will, which is a sign it is growing too soft.

The real work is deadheading, and the timing is specific. Cut the umbels as the flowers fade and before they curl inward into the brown, cupped shape that gives the plant its other name, bird's nest — once that nest has formed the seed is ripe, and shaking the stem sows the bed. A single plant sets several thousand seeds and they stay viable in soil for years, so one missed season becomes a multi-year problem.

Bag what you cut for the trash. Do not leave cut umbels lying on the ground to dry, because they finish ripening their seed after cutting, and do not compost seed heads unless your heap genuinely runs hot.

Wear gloves and long sleeves in summer. The foliage contains the same family of furanocoumarins as parsnip, and sap on skin followed by strong sunlight can raise a delayed blistering rash in sensitive people. It is far milder than wild parsnip or giant hogweed, but do the cutting covered up, and in the evening if you can.

The section that matters: how to tell it from poison hemlock, water hemlock, wild parsnip and giant hogweed - why you still do not dig the root - and what to do if someone has eaten a wild umbel plant.

Is this Queen Anne's lace or poison hemlock? Check the stem first, and check it with your fingers. Queen Anne's lace has a solid, ridged, bristly-hairy stem — the old mnemonic is that the Queen has hairy legs. Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) has a smooth, completely hairless stem with distinct purple blotches, and it is hollow. Then check three more things. Height: Queen Anne's lace is 2 to 4 feet; poison hemlock runs 6 to 10. Smell: crushed Queen Anne's lace foliage smells clearly of carrot; poison hemlock smells musty and unpleasant, often described as mousy. Bracts: Queen Anne's lace carries a conspicuous collar of long, three-forked bracts under the flower head, like a ruff; poison hemlock's are small, few and unforked. Most Queen Anne's lace umbels also carry a single dark purple, almost black floret dead in the centre; poison hemlock never does. If the stem is hairless, or blotched, or the plant is taller than you are, walk away.

Is this Queen Anne's lace or water hemlock? Habitat separates them first: water hemlock (Cicuta) grows in wet ground — marshes, ditches, stream banks, wet meadows — while Queen Anne's lace prefers dry, poor, disturbed soil. Water hemlock's stems are stout, hollow and purple-streaked; its leaflets are coarse and toothed with the side veins running to the notches between the teeth rather than to the tips; its umbels are loose and dome-shaped rather than flat and lacy, with no dark central floret; and its root is chambered. It is at least as deadly as poison hemlock. See the 'water-hemlock' entry.

Is this Queen Anne's lace or wild parsnip? Colour settles it instantly: wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) has yellow umbels, not white, and broad, coarsely toothed, celery-like leaflets instead of fine ferny ones. It is not deadly, but its sap causes severe blistering sunlight burns, so it is not a plant to handle bare-armed either. See the 'wild-parsnip' entry.

It is enormous. Then it is not this plant. A white-umbelled carrot-family plant taller than head height, on a stem thicker than your thumb, is cow parsnip, giant hogweed or poison hemlock — all three burn or poison. Do not touch it; see the 'giant-hogweed' entry.

Can I eat the root? In principle a first-year wild carrot root is edible. In practice, do not dig one. Underground there is no hairy stem to feel, no umbel, no forked bracts and no dark floret — every test that keeps you alive is above ground, and by the time you have a root in your hand it is gone. Poison hemlock and water hemlock grow in the same fields, their first-year rosettes look like this plant's, and their roots have killed people who were certain. Grow carrots from seed; see the 'carrot' entry.

Someone has eaten a wild umbel plant. Treat it as an emergency: call poison control or emergency services immediately, and do not wait for symptoms. Poison hemlock and water hemlock both act fast and neither has an antidote. Take a piece of the plant with you if you can do so safely.

A blistering rash appeared a day after I cut it back. Furanocoumarin burn — sap plus sunlight. Wash with soap and cool water, keep the area out of the sun, and see a doctor if it blisters.

It has taken over. Pull or dig the rosettes in their first year, taproot and all, and cut every umbel before it curls shut. There is no shortcut: the seed bank is the whole problem, and it takes several consecutive seasons.

It propagates itself, thoroughly. The skill is restricting it: save seed deliberately from two or three marked plants and cut everything else at petal-fall - and keep it away from any carrot you are seeding.

There is no technique to learn here. The plant self-sows with total reliability; what you are actually managing is how much of it you get.

To keep a stand going on purpose, mark two or three plants in their flowering year, let those umbels ripen until they curl into the brown cupped nest, then cut the whole head into a paper bag and rub the seed out once it is dry. Sow it fresh in autumn where you want next year's rosettes. Everything else gets cut at petal-fall.

Seed keeps for two to three years in a cool dry jar, but fresh seed sown in autumn germinates far more evenly than stored seed sown in spring.

Keep it away from carrots you are seeding. Queen Anne's lace and the garden carrot are the same species and cross freely, and wild pollen travels a long way on hoverflies. A carrot seed crop needs something like half a mile of isolation from any flowering wild carrot to come true — which, in most gardens, means the honest answer is to buy carrot seed and enjoy this plant purely as a flower. If you do save carrot seed, pull flowering wild carrot out of the surrounding hedgerows as well as your own beds.

Named for a queen's tatting and a pricked finger, carried to America deliberately as a garden herb, and the wild species every carrot on earth descends from.

The lace is a story about needlework. The folk explanation is that Queen Anne of England, a keen lacemaker, pricked her finger while working, and the drop of blood is the dark floret at the centre of the flower. The name may equally point back to Saint Anne, patron of lacemakers. Either way it is one of the few plant names that describes the flower accurately.

Botanically the plant matters far more than the story. Daucus carota is the wild species from which every cultivated carrot descends; the orange root in your vegetable bed is the same species, selected over centuries out of a thin, pale, forked wild taproot. That kinship is not a curiosity — it is exactly why a flowering wild carrot in a hedgerow will happily pollinate the carrots you left for seed, and why the seed you save comes back disappointing.

Colonists brought it to North America on purpose, as a medicinal and pot herb, and it escaped comprehensively. Its seeds carried a long reputation in European folk medicine as a contraceptive and abortifacient, which reflects a real pharmacological effect and is a real reason not to experiment: they are not a safe home remedy, and they should be avoided entirely in pregnancy.

Hardy and unfussy from zone 3 to zone 9, happiest in poor dry ground - which is exactly why it naturalizes wherever it is sown, and why several states list it as a noxious weed.

Zones 3-5: completely hardy. The overwintering rosette shrugs off deep cold and flowers reliably the following summer.

Zones 6-8: the easiest range, and the one where it self-sows hardest. Expect volunteers well beyond where you sowed, and plan the deadheading accordingly.

Zones 9-10: workable as a cool-season plant — sow in autumn for spring bloom — but summer heat usually ends it, and it persists and self-sows far less aggressively.

It tolerates drought, poor soil, gravel and compaction, and it is among the first colonizers of disturbed ground. That toughness is the reason for the listings: Washington (Class C), Michigan, Iowa and Ohio are among the states that carry wild carrot on a noxious weed list, generally because it invades pasture and hayfield rather than because it harms people. Check your own state and county lists before deliberately sowing it. And if you garden next to open range, farmland, or a prairie or meadow restoration, choose a native umbel — golden alexanders, rattlesnake master, or a native Angelica — and give the beneficial insects the same landing pads without the spread.