Queen Anne’s lace is a lovely wildflower that looks like a delicate, white lacy umbrella or a beautiful snowflake made of flowers! If you look really closely, you will see that the white part is actually made of hundreds of teeny-tiny flowers all bunched together in a flat circle. In the very center, there is often one tiny dark purple or red dot, and people say that dot is a drop of blood from Queen Anne of England, who pricked her finger while making lace. This pretty flower is actually the wild ancestor of the carrots we eat, and if you pull it up and smell the root, it smells just like a carrot!
Queen Anne’s lace grows in meadows, along roadsides, and in open fields all across North America and Europe. The flat, umbrella-shaped flower clusters are like perfect little landing pads for butterflies, beetles, and other small insects that come to drink nectar. When the seeds start to form, the flower curls inward and makes a shape that looks like a tiny bird’s nest, which is why some people call it the “bird’s nest flower.” Queen Anne’s lace can grow about as tall as a second-grader, and it blooms from summer all the way into fall. Each plant can make thousands of tiny seeds that spread easily, which is why you can often find big groups of these lacy white flowers swaying together in the breeze.
