Barbara’s Favorite Flower: Queen Anne’s Lace
Queen Anne’s Lace Daucus carota, a wild carrot, is a wonderful flowering biennial that is native to Europe, but naturalized all over North America. Here is what Barbara has to say about this wild carrot:
Related to carrot (Daucus Carrota) you can eat the root when young, (it tastes and smells like carrot) but it gets nasty and woody as it matures.
Women have used the seeds from Daucus carota for centuries as a contraceptive, the earliest written reference dates back to the late 5th or 4th century B.C. appearing in a work written by Hippocrates. “The seeds, harvested in the fall, are a strong contraceptive if taken orally immediately after coitus.” I can not speak to the efficiency but it certainly is interesting historically.