_Daucus Carota_
_Flowers_--Small, of unequal sizes (polygamous), white, rarely pinkish
gray, 5-parted, in a compound, flat, circular, umbel, the central floret
often dark crimson; the umbels very concave in fruit. An involucre of
narrow, pinnately cut bracts. _Stem:_ 1 to 3 ft. high, with stiff hairs;
from a deep, fleshy, conic root. _Leaves:_ Cut into fine, fringy
divisions; upper ones smaller and less dissected.
_Preferred Habitat_--Waste lands, fields, roadsides.
_Flowering Season_--June-September.
_Distribution_--Eastern half of United States and Canada. Europe and
Asia.
A pest to farmers, a joy to the flower-lover, and a welcome signal for
refreshment to hosts of flies, beetles, bees, and wasps, especially to
the paper-nest builders, the sprangly wild carrot lifts its fringy
foliage and exquisite lacy blossoms above the dry soil of three
continents. From Europe it has come to spread its delicate wheels over
our summer landscape, until whole fields are whitened by them east of
the Mississippi. Having proved fittest in the struggle for survival in
the fiercer competition of plants in the over-cultivated Old World, it
takes its course of empire westward year by year, finding most favorable
conditions for colonizing in our vast, uncultivated area; and the less
aggressive, native occupants of our soil are only too readily crowded
out. Would that the advocates of unrestricted immigration of foreign
peasants studied the parallel examples among floral invaders!
Still another fiction is that the cultivated carrot, introduced to
England by the Dutch in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, was derived from
this wild species. Miller, the celebrated English botanist and
gardener, among many others, has disproved this statement by utterly
failing again and again to produce an edible vegetable from this wild
root. When cultivation of the garden carrot lapses for a few
generations, it reverts to the ancestral type--a species quite
distinct from _Daucus Carota_.