Field Notes—

Queen Anne’s Lace

By Curtiss Clark

The end of July is the time of year when I begin to question the gardener’s conceit that plant life can be arranged and ordered to serve a personal aesthetic. I have seen gardens where this appears to be the case, but they are the illusions of master gardeners working in the privileged realms of botanical sorcery. As this fevered July expires in the sere arms of August, our mortal gardens have taken on a feral look of desperation as purslane serpents coil at their feet, and beetles batter their blossomed brows.

We go through the motions of weeding, watering, trimming up the tattered trailers of plants bent on mischief, but Kate and I are already telling each other that we’ll do better next year. There is an air of surrender in our work. But in surrendering ourselves to a hot summer’s cruel indifference to our efforts to bring some refinement to our largely untamed yard, we have found some consolation on the wild side.

Without the benefit of gardeners — master, or otherwise — the summer scene has arranged and ordered itself into beautiful displays of wildflowers: red and white clovers, roadside chicory and, outdoing everything else, … Queen Anne’s lace.

Daucus corota — yes, it is a wild carrot — is growing everywhere in great profusion this summer. There is even a healthy clump of it that pushed itself up through a crack in the asphalt where I park my car at work. Its blossoms grow in umbels, cupped inflorescences that open like a palm for alms conferred by the summer sun. And at the center of some of these little levitating doilies, a single dark red flower can be seen. This oddity accounts for its name.

The Queen Anne reference is to Anne of Denmark, queen consort of King James I, the English monarch who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in a time of much lace and languor for the ruling class. In an idle moment of inattention, as the story goes, Queen Anne pricked her finger with a lace-making needle and spilled a single drop of blood on her work. And since monarchs never do anything that isn’t commemorated forever in some form another, Queen Anne’s lace spread across the world to keep the story alive. Ironically, none of us would know of Anne of Denmark except for the majesty of this summer wildflower.

Queen Anne’s lace isn’t above doing favors for us peasants laboring in gardens. It happens to be a great companion plant to a number of vegetables and flowers afflicted by insects. It attracts beneficial ladybugs and predatory wasps to its tiny florets.

Mostly, however, it blesses us with its simple, and ubiquitous, beauty, arranged and ordered perfectly by its own designs and devices.

(This and more than 65 other Field Notes essays are available at www.field-notebook.com.)