Common
Name: Queen Anne’s Lace, Wild Carrot, Bird’s Nest weed, Fool’s
parsley, Rantipole, Devil’s plague, Herbe á dinde (French – Turkey herb) – The
delicate symmetrical growth pattern of the compound florets has the superficial
appearance of lace. The reference to Queen Anne is discussed below.
Scientific
Name:
Daucus carota
– The generic name is from the Greek root word daukos which is related to the word daiein, meaning to ignite or burn; some plants of the genus have a
very acrid taste that burns the mouth. Carota is the Latin word for carrot from
the Greek karōton, which is
probably from the word kara meaning
‘head.’ This may be because of the large size of the umbel type florescence. It
is sometimes listed as D. gingidium
in older texts.
Queen Anne’s Lace is probably the most whimsical floral
metaphor that the English speaking peoples applied to their new environs as
they settled and colonized the New World. The weedy native Eurasian plant known
in England as wild carrot was transported inadvertently, probably in the early
shipments of grain that sustained them in advance of established plantations. A
biennial, it produces prodigious quantities of seeds that are effectively
disseminated by the tumbleweed trajectory of the umbel head, their subsequent
germination responsible for the ubiquity of the flower. The plant consists of a
symmetrical array of small white florets that bears a striking resemblance to
an antimacassar (doily) on the back of a drawing room chair. Near the center of
the white expanse one can usually find a singular purple floret, whose purpose
and evolution is still a subject of considerable debate among botanists.
There
are myriad theories for the etymology of the North American name Queen Anne’s
Lace; in Great Britain, it has been called the wild carrot ever since it was so
designated by the English botanist William Turner in his 1548 work, The
Names of Herbes. Anne was the Queen of England from 1702 to 1714, the last
of the Stuart regents who preceded her second cousin, George I of the German
House of Hanover. The most prevalent legend is that Queen Anne, who was
somewhat of an outsider having married a Danish prince, sought to establish her
ascendency over the ladies of the court by challenging them to make tatting as
graceful and elegant in appearance as the wild carrot, as only she, a renowned
lace maker could do. As none succeeded, she established her regency. This is embellished by the codicil that she
pricked her finger while making lace, the effusion of her blood imparting the
purplish hue to the singular floret. I would offer a much more facile and
direct etymology. The English colonists who proliferated in New England in the
early 18th Century likely noticed that the weedy plant that they
know as wild carrot back home had begun to appear in the waste areas adjacent
to their fields and paths. Since Anne was Queen of England at this time, and
since the flower indubitably looks like lace, it became Queen Anne’s lace, a
lacy flower from the homeland. As it is an excellent mnemonic metaphor, it
entered the American argot.
The
evolutionary origin of the singular purple-hued floret near the center of the
umbel has been the subject of considerable debate in the botanical community
for many years. It was long thought to be simply an anomaly, but a growing
appreciation of the extent to which evolution drives physiology has led to the
consideration that it is there for a purpose, which is fairly evident on
inspection. It looks like an insect from a distance. It is therefore
hypothesized that the insect-like floret attracts other insects according to
the duck decoy in the pond effect. This would enhance the pollination chances
of the flower and therefore improve its chances of survival, a Darwinian
fundamental. The scant field testing that has been done to validate the
hypothesis has not yielded a viable result, so it is still a matter of
speculation. Since Queen Anne’s lace is very successful at replication, one
could certainly make the argument that an enticement to pollinators would be a
contributing factor. Once pollinated,
the individual florets produce fruits with small spines that readily attach to
animals. The umbel curls up into a ball, whence the common name bird’s nest,
which acts as a seed dispenser when detached from the host plant.
While
Queen Anne’s lace and the domestic or garden carrot share the same species name
(Daucus carota), it is not
necessarily true that they are the same plant. Logic would dictate that the
former is a cultivar of the latter and it is usually referred to as D. carota var. sativa (from the Latin word meaning cultivated), but some
authorities hold that the wild carrot is a derivative of the domestic carrot
that escaped from cultivation and hybridized.
This latter view gained credence based on a failed attempt by the
renowned 18th Century Scottish botanist Philip Miller to improve on
the wild carrot by hybridization. He could not produce anything resembling the
recognizable orange tuber in spite of a concerted effort. It has also been
observed that garden carrots revert to the wild in several seasons; the result
differs from D. carota. On the other
hand, the American agronomist Lewis Sturtevant was a strong proponent of the
view that the wild carrot is in fact the progenitor of the garden carrot. Writing in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of
the World, he notes that “the wild plant is the original of the cultivated
carrot, for, cultivation and selection, Vilmorin-Andrieux (the French seed
company founded by the botanist to King Louis XV) obtained in the space of
three years roots as fleshy and as large as those of the garden carrot from the
thin, wiry roots of the wild species.”
The carrot is referred to in ancient writings without
regard to the any distinction between the wild and garden varieties. Tracing
the etymology is complicated by the fact that it is frequently conflated with
the parsnip, a tuber of similar provenance. Gaius Plinius Secundus, the Roman
naturalist better known as Pliny the Elder wrote of the carrot that “they
cultivate a plant in Syria … the wild carrot, which some call gingidium, yet more slender and more
bitter, and of the same properties, which is eaten cooked and raw, and is of
great service as a stomachic … called by us gallicam
but by the Greeks daucon.” Note that D. gingidium and D. carota are synonymous and that the name gallicam likely meant that it came to Italy from France (Gaul). It
is the general consensus that the carrot was first cultivated in what is now
Afghanistan and made its way throughout the Old World. It was known to the
Greeks and Romans; in addition to Pliny, the Greek physician Galen offered the
opinion that the root of the wild carrot was not as palatable as that of the
domestic carrot. It had made its way to China in the 13th Century
Yuan Dynasty and thereafter spread throughout Asia. The domestic carrot is reputed to have been
brought to England by the Dutch in 1558 whence it made its way to the New
World; it is reported to have been cultivated in Virginia in 1609 and
Massachusetts in 1629. It’s ubiquity is best captured by Sturtevant, who writes
that “so fond of carrots are the Flathead Indians of Oregon, that the children
cannot forbear stealing them from the fields, although honest as regards other
articles.”
The wild carrot version of D. carota has a long history of use for a variety of medicinal
treatments of which contraception is the most prevalent. Hippocrates, the Greek
father of Western medicine, first ascribed this attribute in addition to its
more purposeful use as an abortifacient. The seeds of the wild carrot were
first used in a potion for contraception by the Soranus of Ephesus, the 2nd
Century Greek physician of Rome, and, notably, the author of the four volume
treatise on gynecology. The subsequent use of the wild carrot potion as an
abortive pessary was opposed by some physicians, particularly Scribonius
Largus, the physician of the Emperor Claudius. He argued that the Hippocratic Oath
which forbade doing harm could not allow for the termination of life. The
debate about a woman’s reproductive rights did not, at this time, likely enter
into the discussion; it is nonetheless interesting to note that the issue has
roots that are as ancient as those of the wild carrot. There has been some
limited clinical evaluation of the contraceptive properties of the wild carrot.
Studies in the late 1980’s showed that progesterone synthesis was arrested in
pregnant experimental trial animals that were administered a wild carrot
preparation. The reduction in the propensity for the fertilized egg to become
embedded in the uterine wall due to the dearth of progesterone would limit
viability and thus promote contraception.
There was apparently an experiment conducted in New York City in which
twelve women used wild carrot seeds as their only means of contraception. Three
conceived; not a very positive result.
The medicinal properties of D. carota go well beyond its dubious merits as a contraceptive. It
is described in various herbals as having a wide variety of generally
beneficent effects that range from kidney stone prevention to the aphrodisiac
stimulation of the sex hormones. The complex chemistry of the plant is
responsible for its panacea-like herbal notoriety; it contains everything from asarone,
a potent fungicide and bacteriophage, to xanthotoxin, a treatment for skin disorders
such as psoriasis. Thomas Culpeper in his Complete Herbal of 1652 promotes
wild carrots to “provoke urine and women’s courses, and helpeth to break and
expel the stone; the seed also of the same worketh the like effect, and is good
for the dropsy, and those whose bellies are swollen with wind. The leaves being
applied with honey to running sores or ulcers, do cleanse them.” One of the more promising constituents of the
wild (and garden) carrot is falcarinol, also known as carotatoxin, a fatty
alcohol and natural pesticide. Preliminary research has demonstrated that it
has anti-cancer properties in the reduction of tumor formation in laboratory
rats.