Queen Anne’s lace, also known as wild carrot, is a weed and is thought by some to be invasive, noxious, and aggravating.
It is also quite beautiful, and it grows in profusion around our area.
The flower resembles off-white lace and was named for Queen Anne of England, who was an expert lace maker. Legend has it that when Queen Anne was making lace, she pricked her finger and left a drop of blood on the lace. Each flower has a dark purple floweret in its center, resembling a drop of blood.
Although I had seen Queen Anne’s lace as I was growing up in the country, I never thought about it much until one day in junior high school when our language arts teacher read us a poem about a woman who mowed her lawn and left a clump of Queen Anne’s lace unmown and out of place in the otherwise neatly cut grass.
The woman was called “eccentric” by her neighbors for leaving a clump of flowers in the middle of her lawn, but she did not really care.
Three ideas stuck in my mind after that junior high school language arts lesson.
First, I learned the meaning of “eccentric,” and the poem frequently pops back into my mind when I come across the word in print or when I hear it spoken.
Also, the image of Queen Anne’s lace became fixed in my mind, since there was a picture of it in the textbook.
Then, the idea of someone leaving a spot of beauty undisturbed left a huge impression on me.
You do not have to travel far to encounter the beautiful, flowering weed growing wild around here this time of the year.
A couple of weeks ago as I was driving through the countryside between Wilson and Rocky Mount, I noticed a whole field of Queen Anne’s lace that reached from the ditch bank to the woods line. I was tempted to stop the car, cross the ditch bank and walk through the flowering weeds until I reached the woods.
I decided against such an adventure, since I was wearing black clothing and heels, was on my way to an event and did not want to be guilty of trespassing. I probably would have picked some of the flowers, another offense.
On another occasion recently as I was driving through the outskirts of Wilson, I noticed to my left a vacant lot with our lacy friend growing freely, right in town. As I looked to the right, I saw a companion vacant lot, this one mown, except for – you guessed it – a clump of Queen Anne’s lace growing up against a tall, yellow marker at the edge of the lot.
The clump was left unmown either because the mower could not get close enough to the marker to mow the vegetation or because he had chosen to leave a spot of beauty on the lot.
You can figure out which was the case.
I cannot possibly think about leaving flowers standing without referring to Robert Frost’s fine poem, “The Tuft of Flowers.”
The poem paints a picture of someone who goes out to turn over the grass after another person had mown in the early morning. The speaker, who is alone in the mown space, notices a bewildered butterfly as it goes “round and round,” apparently looking for vegetation that was growing the day before.
The speaker follows the butterfly as it flies over to a tuft of flowers growing by a nearby brook. The tuft of flowers, which the speaker realizes is butterfly weed, had been spared by the mower as he was doing his work.
The speaker believes that the mower spared the butterfly weed “not for us,” but from “sheer morning gladness at the brim.”
The mower in two of the above examples – and maybe all three – left something of beauty undisturbed, either Queen Anne’s lace or butterfly weed. All three examples teach us that beauty is something to be cherished and protected.
The natural world gives us myriads of opportunities to experience “sheer morning gladness” or gladness at any other time of the day.
I do not do the mowing on our property, but if I did, I would almost want to leave all the dandelions unmown out of gladness.
I wonder what the neighbors would think of that.
Credit: wilsontimes.com