Human Flower Project

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Like a Virgin: Queen Anne’s Lace

Not virginal but “like a virgin,” Daucus carota only looks delicate, meanwhile “taking the field by force.”

Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) along Hwy 421, Midway, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

It’s been nine years since we lived in Kentucky. And as we discovered during a July visit there, that’s time enough for drastic changes. We won’t venture into the mortal changes, but stick to the human/floral:

In Kentucky Daucus carota is as much a part of summer as fresh corn and wet bathing suits. We remember huge foamy fields of it. One 4th of July, 1993, we cut mounds of the white flowers along with chicory to decorate a backyard barbecue for 90.

Supposedly this wildflower (an immigrant from Europe) grows in Central Texas, too, but not like this. Driving to Lexington on Monday, we stopped to visit a healthy clump on the road out of Midway. The flower hadn’t changed; we had—into the kind of person who’d pull over in traffic and then trespass on private property all so that we could come close enough to see the purple-black blotch at the center of each Queen Anne’s Lace flower.

Seems that even real botanists don’t know what that dark splotch is for. According to lore, Queen Anne of Denmark, a hobby-lacemaker, pricked her finger and left one drop of blood on her handiwork (shades of Cinderella). “Perhaps this unusually colored flower part serves as a target for potential pollinators,” one source surmises. But perhaps not.

Queen Anne of Denmark
by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
(1605-1610)
Image: via Wiki

Here is a portrait of Queen Anne of Denmark (1574-1619) in some lacy finery. And here is naturalist Jim Conrad’s just as complimentary portrait of Daucus carota’s “flowering strategy”:

“Daucus carota accomplishes two important feats. First, the large, bright flower clusters attract pollinators from afar. Second, the tiny flowers comprising the clusters are so numerous that if one flower is damaged plenty of other blossoms can take its place. Many flowering plants benefit from either the large-blossomed, pollinator-attracting strategy or the small-flower, risk-spreading strategy, but Daucus carota has figured out how to use both.”

Speaking of attracting pollinators, we understand that the seed of Queen Anne’s Lace has been used for centuries as a “morning after” contraceptive. We do NOT advise it. Daucus carota closely resembles at least two poisonous plants, Poison Hemlock (Conium maculatum) and Water Hemlock (Cicuta maculata). Killing mother is a very poor method of birth control.

Revisiting this summer flower, we remembered also William Carlos Williams’s poem—
Center of a Queen Anne’s Lace inflorescence
Photo: Hilton Pond Center

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.

Williams included this poem in his early collection Sour Grapes, first published in 1921. It was a set piece that he apparently thought turned out well, because in later years he often chose to read it. Listen to this recording from 1950.

We like his poem too: a meditation on purity, in which a touch, a drop of desire changes everything.