Wild carrot
Daucus carota
Family · Apiaceae · Irritating
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This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
The wild grandmother of the garden carrot, and the commonest white umbellifer on Portuguese verges. It is also the one that forces you to learn this family, because it shares the white parasol with hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort.
Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture · Town and roadside · Dunes and sand
Also known asQueen Anne's lace, bird's nest
How to tell it
Three signs, and all three should agree. First: the stem is hairy and rough to the hand, not smooth. Second: below the umbel there is a collar of finely divided green bracts, like little feathers, which no other native umbellifer shows so clearly. Third: the crushed root smells of carrot. Many plants also carry a single dark red floret in the centre of the umbel, and the umbel closes into a bird's nest as it dries.
What it is confused with
Poison hemlock
Conium maculatum
This is the confusion that kills, and it is settled by hand and by nose. Run your hand along the stem: wild carrot is hairy, hemlock is smooth with purple blotches. Smell it: carrot versus mouse. And hemlock has no collar of divided bracts under the umbel.
Hemlock water-dropwort
Oenanthe crocata
Place separates them almost always: wild carrot grows dry, hemlock water-dropwort with its feet in water. And the dropwort's leaflets are broad and toothed like oversized parsley, not in fine threads.
What it is for
The first-year root was eaten cooked before the garden carrot existed, and the seeds were used as a spice. Today the interest is mostly botanical: it is the species the orange carrot was bred from, in 17th-century Holland. The foliage can irritate the skin, especially when wet and in sunlight: handling it bare-handed and then being out in the sun can cause redness and blisters.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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