Queen Anne's Lace

Just started to walk around and explore what flora we have around the rouge valley since I live near it..I know queen anne is norm and kind of boring, but as I was taking pictures of the seeds that I have collected, I noticed this one bunch of QAL with a red flower in the centre....I checked out the other ones and they were all white! but just this bunch of plants isolated from the other ones had it...i thought it was just a lost bud but all the flower heads on this plant all had a red centre. Is this normal?

It's kinda windy and my camera's not that good....so some of the pictures might be blurry...

and another one..

...

Yes, it's normal for some not to have it. Kind of like how some flowers will have an odd number of petals. I have a lot of it in my bed (and love it) and I think that I've noticed that the earlier blooms on the plant have the red center and the later ones do not. That was just observation, no scientific research on my part.

There are also other plants that are almost identical but are not QAL like the Poison Hemlock and it will not have the red center. The Hemlocks have red veins along the stems and the QAL doesn't. QAL stems are also hairy.

I was waiting for Stan to open one gate and close another and I wandered along a fenceline that had lots of QAL. Some of them had very black centers, some had dark red and one had no center, but did have a pink blush to the larger florets around the outside of the flower head. Interesting plant.

The pink edge is my favorite part...just beautiful!

konkreteblond, those are beautiful! I've never seen those around. I did go around the park again and saw the ones with black centre! very intriguing and unique. I'm always seeing QAL around my place and never bothered to look at them closely. They're so interesting!

They are beautiful and everything loves them! This is one of my favorite pics of a Snout and Painted Lady butterfly next to a small wasp. The flowers are always covered with something.

I thought I was the only one to notice pink flowers. At first I thought it was from the rocks the kids painted around the garden edge. Now I have to rethink my whole idea. My thoughts were that the water colors washed into the soil and tinted the flowers. Any one else who has seen flowers this dark.

Oh, that's pretty! I've never seen mine that dark so maybe it has something to do with the bricks. You are supposed to be able to cut them, put them in water with food coloring and turn the entire flowers pink etc. I tried it but it didn't work. ?

I had picked one like that and intended to take a picture, but my DGD and I decided to do the food coloring in the water trick and now they are all very pink. I would say perhaps it has something to do with soil acidity or nutrients in the soil, o perhaps a viral infection.

I do agree with you that QAL is quite pretty. But please know that it is not native to North America. It was introduced from Europe and is now classified as a noxious weed in at least 5 states. Noxious weeds are deemed so by federal and/or state authorities and pose a threat to agriculture and horticulture. Please consider removing these plants or at least cutting off the flowers before they set seed.

The sticky at the top of this forum has links to more information on introduced undesirables loose in our landscapes.

I've done the dye trick for students. I split the stem and put each half in a different glass of color water using food dye. The flowers will pull up the water and the flower will have two different colors.

from the Nature Conservancy Species Management Summary for Daucus carota aka QAL:

"Daucus carota is not usually a high-priority for management, but it can be persistent or require active management of heavy soils with a good clay content. Control is achieved by hand-pulling or mowing close to the ground before seed se. On lighter sandy soils it may persist for a few years on recovering prairies but tends to decline on its own as the native grasses and forbs become established."

There is a great deal more concern aimed at QAL than it deserves.

More concern than it deserves? Hmmm. Perhaps. However, in my state anything declared to be a noxious weed is required to be removed. So I guess your level of concern might vary with your region. In general though, I myself try to watch out for the exotic (for North America) species that are causing trouble already or are of potential concern. With so many plant choices it only seems to make sense to avoid the bad guys. Yeah, I recycle and buy local/organic too. Every little bit helps!

But this is America and we are all free to do as we choose. Unless of course it's a noxious weed in your state :)

hmm..they don't really grow in home gardens around my area, only seen it once (I believed the QAL was purposely planted there as they were bunched in specific corners). On my side of the house, nothing grows, most likely because of the quality of the soil that the developers had put in, so every year my mom has to put some kind of manure/organic materials in there and this can be tedious as it goes up and down on a slope, hence we have to take out the previous soil from last year. Everything here dies, so what I was thinking is just grow some wild flowers that were local around my area such as the small yellow looking ones (I believe Kathleen id-ed these for me in another discussion forum and had given some pointers). I'm concerned about the management of these weeds in my garden if we plan to change plants etc. and they could also easily spreed by seeds to my neighbours and then to another community (you get the gist/idea). But yeah I guess it depends on people's opinion.

This is a picture of an area where they proliferate like crazy..not really part of the community that I lived in, I think this part belongs to the conservatory area also....

Yes, it depends on what area you live in for almost every plant. It is not listed as invasive or noxious in my state, so I have it. It does reseed abundantly thus I am outside trying to deadhead every single plant. But like the post above states, they pretty much just live a year or two and then comes up from seed. I just pulled out all my older plants and have a fresh new green batch of babies but I thin them out. Hopefully my little cottontails will munch on a lot of them too!

I'm going to have to try the dye trick again. Did you use food coloring? As I said before, I've noticed my last few blooms have had no red center.

evr - your circumstances remind me of my own. My interest in using natives has really been intensified with my recent move. We now have a former pasture, idle but with regular mowing for many years before we got here. Nothing decent plant-wise, and certainly several less than desirable species. And watching the insanely aggressiveness of the bull thistles, quack grass and ground ivy made me understand how difficult a challenge I really have.

The space is too large to weed, water and baby. So whatever I do must be able to fend for itself. Thus the same conclusion that you came to - work with nature and use what is best suited to grow here. Hopefully with increasingly less management and interference required of me as time goes on.

I'm still in the learning stages and have only begun my work. But I'm surprised by how difficult it can be to sort through all the conflicting and confusing information out there. And for some reason this seems to become an emotional topic at times. Something I find the most difficult to understand of all!

So I'm lurking and participating on this forum in hopes of learning from all the experience offered here.

Around here, QAL is like dandelions; they're just absolutely everywhere. (Garlic mustard is getting that way too.) I'd never plant it, and pull it when I find it in the garden, but I suspect trying to eradicate it from the wild would be hopeless.

I don't have a hope of getting rid of all the QAL around here, so I pull the ones that come up in my flower beds and leave the ones that proliferate in the unmowed areas. They co-exist happily with wild Goldenrod and Asters in a dry, grassy area behind my house. I've just been out to see if I have any of the pink ones, and no such luck!

I think for the most part in the northeastern part of the continent QAL is with us forever, along with field daisies, yarrow, musk mallows, chicory and hawksweed.

evr, if you want to go native, asters and goldenrod would fill the bill in the late summer and autumn. For earlier, there are some nice native hardy geraniums along with Jacob's ladder, and blue-eyed grass. Just know that most successful natives can become rather a problim slipping into places you don't necessarily want them

Ohhh see, I love Goldenrod but here (in my garden) it's so much more invasive than QAL ever thought about. It spreads by runners and just came up everywhere. I'm scared of it now. :( I've got a non-native Goldenrod that I think is something like "Fireworks" and it behaves very well and has been one of the most drought tolerant plants I've got this year.

I've heard that about some native species of goldenrod. But I also heard that there are some that do not spread like that. Stiff maybe?? I don't remember off the top of my head. I believe the Helianthus are similar. Some if not all can get aggressive.

I guess it all depends on what you're doing. If you have an area that can't be tended it probably makes more sense environmentally to turn some of the aggressive natives loose rather than letting the aggressive non-natives take over. But in a confined landscape area better to steer clear of those natives that aren't well behaved. There seems to be lots of choices for me in my prairie/wet meadow areas so I should be able to stay out of trouble. Just because I prefer to convert my property from flat wannabe turf to something else doesn't mean my neighbors will LOL!

Around here, Canada goldenrod is considered the most aggressive, but I'm sure the situation varies by climate. There are even some threatened goldenrod species.