Queen Anne's Lace

This weed is one of my favorite flowers. When we lived in Kansas City there was an abandon house that sat along a road I traveled often that had a front yard surrounded by a white picket fence. Inside the fence the yard had gone wild and was filled with a graceful carpet of Queen Anne's Lace. For years I thought that someday maybe we would buy that house and live in it, but alas, that never happened. Still, in my wishing I had thought to myself I would probably leave the front yard mostly alone. Perhaps I would have only carved a small walk way down the middle of the Queen Anne's Lace and paved it with natural stone set in sand. Oh well, I say all of that to give you a picture of one of my very favorite flowers.
The blooms are a simple white and it grows best in poor soils and areas left to themselves. It is also known as the wild carrot, very close in kin to our edible varieties. On my list of favorite cut flowers it ranks right up there in my top three, the other two being white Casa Blanca Oriental Lilies and white daisies. Um...I guess I love the simplicity of white flowers.
Anyhow, since moving to South Carolina I am pleased to find that Queen Anne's Lace grows here also and graces the shore around the lake behind Morning Star. We walk around this lake as a family almost nightly and lately I have taken to picking a few stems of lace for my table. It is amazingly beautiful in my opinion and the blooms last a long time. I keep adding water to their little vase and they keep drinking it up and blooming their little hearts out. One of the numbers in this vase you see is over a week old and still looks as new as the day I picked it.

Ah, simple pleasures.
You know every flower has a meaning, especially in bouquets? Well Queen Anne's Lace represents 'sanctuary', and I think that makes it even more lovely a bloom in my world right now.
Here is a little poem I found about the flower that I love:

Queen Anne's Lace II

A table on which the bees

may sup

For them by His grace

God has raveled out of

space

a table which has merged

with its 

cloth of lace.

                                                  by Saiomi Shriver

Live near a field? You probably can find some of these growing there. So enjoy them despite their weed status.