wild carrot
Scientific Name: Daucus carota
Other Names: carotte sauvage, Bird's-nest, Queen Anne's-Lace, carotte
Family: Carrot or Parsley Family (Umbelliferae)
General Description: Wild carrot is a biennial or occasionally annual and sometimes a short-lived perennial, reproducing only by seed.
Habitat: Wild carrot occurs throughout most of Ontario in old pastures, waste areas, roadsides, meadows and occasionally as a weed in gardens and flower borders. The cultivated carrot was developed from wild carrot, which has a coarse, woody, fibrous, unpalatable taproot, by selecting strains having soft juicy edible roots.
Seedlings
- Seedlings emerge during spring and early summer
- Two long, narrow, thin cotyledons
Stems
- First year plant is usually stem-less with a deeply penetrating taproot
- Stem produced in the second year on biennial plants
- Stem is erect, up to 1 m tall
- Stem is branching, grooved, rough-hairy or bristly
Leaves
- First year, rosette of stalked, very finely dissected, hairy leaves
- Leaves are almost identical in appearance and smell to leaves of cultivated carrot
- Bases of leafstalks are broad and flat
- Stem leaves are similar to basal leaves but smaller and on shorter stalks
- Base of leafstalk is broadened and circles the stem at each node
- First true leaf is compound with three main divisions
- Later leaves are compound with many divisions
Flowers and Fruit
- Flowers are white in compound umbels at tips of stem and branches
- A whorl of several 3 to 5 branched bracts at the base of each compound umbel
- Most flowers are white or sometimes pink, but a single flower in the centre of the compound umbel is dark purple
- After flowering, umbel closes forming a “bird’s nest”
- Seeds are gray-brown with several rows of spines by which they cling to clothing and animal fur
- Flowers from June to September
Often Confused With / Distinguishing Features
It is distinguished by its finely divided leaves, its erect, hairy stem, its white to pinkish compound umbels surrounded at their bases by whorls of slender 3 to 5 branched bracts, its bird's-nest cluster of fruits and its typical carrot odour (stems, leaves and root), and a coarse, fibrous, unpalatable root.
Herbicide Resistance
Documented resistance in Ontario to WSSA Group 4 herbicides, synthetic auxins.
References
http://www.weedinfo.ca/en/weed-index/view/id/DAUCA
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/ontweeds/wild_carrot.htm
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