Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) also known as wild carrot is a biennial invasive with a long taproot. It is native to Europe, southwestern Asia and North Africa.
Queen Anne’s lace, which we refer to as QAL, is found is nearly all habitats. It spreads aggressively by seeds. One plant can produce 1000-40,000 seeds (USDA). A seedbank is viable for 7 or more years. Some say it will get outcompeted but nothing in the literature suggests this. I suppose if your ecosystem is mostly the tall C4 grasses (aka the bully grasses) such as Big bluestem or Indian grass, this plant could get crowded out because of their sod-forming roots. If you’re wanting a diverse habitat, you’ll need to plan for management of this invasive. Anecdotally, a friend said she did nothing and they went away, yet when touring her remnant, it was thick with QAL. Any space that seed can find, it will germinate, even in the thickest of habitats!
It’s difficult to take photos of the plant because the stems splay out and blend with the surroundings unless it’s in bloom.
Each white flower is part of this whole flower head — known as an umbel.
Germination can occur in spring and autumn (Lacey 1982). Once germinated, the umbel closes and dries out as the seeds mature. It’s unknown what the germination rate is for QAL but it’s fairly high.
Seeds disperse is mainly by wind but they don’t go far from the parent plant; if dispersed in winter after a snowfall, they can travel much further (Lacey 1982). They can also be transported on clothing or animal fur but this is less so.
Plant leaves cause skin irritation in some people and cause cows to produce off-tasting milk after eating large quantities (USDA).
While QAL provides a cover for wildlife, it has little value for wildlife beyond that. I have seen pollinators searching on the flowers, but this alone is not reason enough to maintain this plant. A diversity of native plants that bloom throughout the growing season is much more helpful to pollinators than the short time QAL is blooming. And the native plants provide so much more to wildlife; they serve as food, habitat, reproductive hosts, and provide cover.
Photo to the right: This is what is looks like when it’s setting seeds. The umbel curls into a ball and each of those little white flowers develop into a seed. It’s easy to see how prolific these plants can be.
Control
One must be persistent in removing this plant. It will pay off!
Hand pulling/Predator’g
Hand pulling or using the parsnip predator is the most effective. It’s unknown if the seeds will continue to gain viability once pulled. Because of this, I pop the umbel off and break the stems and leave it to decompose in the prairie. If the seeds are already starting to form, I bag and carry them out. Whether they would finish and be viable is another piece of information I haven’t been able to substantiate.
Hand pulling or predator’g must be done more than once in a growing season. QAL plants flower at different times. We feel like it comes in waves. Once the first one pops up, we give it a week or so, then go through and pull all those we find. If they aren’t in bloom, they can be difficult to see in the vegetation.
The base of the stem moves down to a single root so using a Parsnip Predator to sever that root is fairly easy.
Herbicide
Herbicide using Garlon 4 in bark oil is effective IF used on the early rosettes or as a basal bark treatment of adults. The plant has such feathery leaves that any foliar application results in substantial collateral damage.
Mowing
Mowing can triage the plant if seeds aren’t already forming. If you mow too early in the season, the plant regrows, only shorter, making it difficult to find to pull or too low for the mower. Mowing too late in the season, if this isn’t a monoculture, will also result in collateral damage to your native plants.
Fire
Fire is not effective and can encourage its appearance (Hilty 2015; USDA). QAL thrives with disturbance.
To help think it through, consider these facts. QAL seedlings emerge throughout the growing season and are not up at dormant spring burn time. The opening of the land with fire during the dormant season would encourage it. A summer burn might set back QAL but it would also set back the native plants one needs to outcompete QAL. If the summer burn wasn’t at the end of ALL the QAL emerging, it would have the same encouraging effect as a dormant season burn. Getting the timing accurate would be incredibly difficult.
Some claim (not scientifically though) that repeatedly annual burns will reduce QAL. This might happen IF the ecosystem was dominated with Big bluestem and/or Indian grasses as they would become denser with each burn, which also means the ecosystem would lose plant diversity. Burning this often has its own set of issues to be considered. Is that your goal?
Prescribed burns are intentionally not hot. They are considered low intensity burns (Miller et al. 2017). Even with the highly flammable C4 grasses such as Big bluestem and Indian grass, in the scientific literature, these are categorized as low intensity burns. Additionally, most people burn often enough to maintain low fuels again reducing the intensity. This is a lot of think about with fire and applies to much more than QAL!
As with most control methods, overseeding is a must. If you have an established crop of these, you’ll want to get your natives more established so as you remove the seedbank, the natives take over and eventually the QAL is left to a plant here and there.
While you’re in the throes of controlling QAL, you’ll feel like it will never end, but it does. Over the course of 2 months and several times through an ecosystem, we finally feel we have gotten the last one. That is when we celebrate “the end of QAL” for that year.
References
Hilty, J. 2015. Wild carrot: Daucus carota. Illinois wildflowers. Wild Carrot (Daucus carota) (illinoiswildflowers.info)
Koul, P., Koul, A. K., & Hamal, I. A. 1989. Reproductive biology of wild and cultivated carrot (Daucus carota L.). New Phytologist, 112(3), 437-443.
Lacey, E. P. 1982. Timing of seed dispersal in Daucus carota. Oikos, 83-91.
Miller, Jesse ED, Ellen I. Damschen, Zak Ratajczak, and Mutlu Özdoğan. 2017. Holding the line: three decades of prescribed fires halt but do not reverse woody encroachment in grasslands. Landscape Ecology 32: 2297-2310.
USDA Forest Service, Forest Health Staff, Newtown Square, PA
I have a small area around my home where QAL will sprout up every few years. I have as you said, I waited until they were going to seed, then If I pull gently most often, the entire root comes out of the ground or a good chunk. Since you mentioned the parsnip predator, I can assume if it is cut off below ground at the right time of year it will die.
I actually see more pollinators on other flowers rather than QAL. I was able to eradicate it from around my yard by using my current method.
Thank you for sharing this article.
Good job!!! We’ve found that if the root is severed, that particular plant doesn’t grow back. The severing keeps the ground in tact (most of the time) as it’s an in and out movement and not a digging. This lack of disturbance keeps the seedbank seeds from germinating and gives the native plants time to move in and outcompete.