Beautiful flower or noxious weed? Queen Anne's Lace exploding in Iowa

Iowa is awash in a sea of delicate white flowers in nearly every roadside ditch, along bicycle trails and on the fringes of public parks. 

It’s called Queen Anne’s Lace, or wild carrot.

It’s abundant this year and especially visible now in its midsummer flowering. Optimal weather conditions the past two years and a generation of modified roadside management practices (less mowing and herbicide spraying) have combined to create a bumper crop. 

It’s either nature’s art or a nuisance, a wildflower or a weed, according to the eye of the beholder. Its slender stalks stand up to five feet, topped by a flat-top, five-inch plate of tiny flowers. Photographers love to post it on social media, while vegetable gardeners yank it out with abandon.

“It’s an opportunistic plant,” said John Pearson, an ecologist at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

A wet spring followed by midsummer dry weather that stresses grasses and forbs allows Queen Anne’s Lace to pop up, maybe even in your lawn. During a dry spell in 2012, Pearson recalled, a photograph of his lawn showed a mosaic of Queen Anne’s.

It is a non-native plant, brought to America by Europeans who wanted it for the garden. It easily spread. Its name, legend has it, came from Queen Anne, who was challenged by friends to create lace as beautiful as the flower. While making the lace, she accidentally pricked her finger and created a drop of blood. The plant’s grouping of tiny flowers sometimes has a tiny purple flower at its center.

“One of the reasons it is so successful, like other exotics, is its liberated from normal pest controls in Europe,” Pearson said. “People use the term invasive for any species that behaves aggressively and can become abundant. But I like to reserve the term for something more extreme. This is a non-native but, to me, it doesn’t really rise to the definition of invasive, with the exception of drought years.”

Iowa is one of six states – including Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Washington and West Virginia – where Queen Anne’s Lace is rated noxious in the vast majority of counties, meaning it needs to be controlled, according to the Biota of North America.

Queen Anne’s Lace was not slandered as noxious by farmers, however. It was labeled the term legally in Iowa Code, chapter 317, for limiting agriculture production and causing economic harm.

“At one time in agriculture it was troublesome but with management practices today, I don’t think it’s a problem,” said Ryan Krull, the state weed commissioner with the Iowa Department of Agriculture. “It’s usually pretty easy to control.”

The plant is biennial, which means it takes two years to grow and seed, so mowing it down consistently will normally limit its spread. But Krull said with new management of roadside ditches, where mowing isn’t allowed until July 15 and county weed commissioners use less spray to encourage native vegetation, Queen Anne’s Lace could become a problem.

Bob Hartzler, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University, sees it instead as an example of outdated Iowa Noxious Weed Law. It’s a naturalized plant but because it is part of Iowa Code, it’s hard to remove from the noxious list.

Like a long-time immigrant seeking citizenship, Queen Anne’s Lace has established its place in Iowa going back to 1913, when L.H. Pammel described its species mate, the wild parsnip, as common on Iowa roadsides, he said.

Wild parsnip is also in the carrot species and has enjoyed a productive summer, although its yellow flowers that bloom earlier have largely disappeared. That plant can be troublesome for humans, however, causing severe rashes when touched.

Queen Anne’s Lace is the friendly cousin in the carrot family, and the tap root is edible. It tastes just like a domesticated carrot, said Andy Benson, a naturalist at the Mines of Spain State Recreation Area and a dedicated wild plant forager.

“I’ve eaten it plenty of times. It’s the same as a regular carrot in all aspects, except that it’s pretty tough and only the outer layer is really edible,” he said. “I knew a lady growing up that had them in her garden and treated them as garden plants.”

It’s not just good pickings for humans. Bug Guide, a naturalists’ online community, shows numerous wasps, bees, beetles and butterflies nectaring on its flowers.

Its artistic beauty also attracts humans to them, the flat or slightly domed heads of white flowers eventually curl into a ball that look like another of its common names, the “bird’s nest.”

Betty Printy has centered her retail pottery business around the plant for 30 years in tiny Bentonsport in southern Iowa.

“I was experimenting with a lot of different plants, when I put the Queen Anne’s Lace on my pottery. It’s light and airy enough that it shows the whole flower,” said Printy, whose shop with blacksmith husband Bill is called Iron & Lace.

When her pottery is still moist and leathery, she presses a flower to the clay, puts the coloring on the impression, dries and burns the pot, leaving the art of nature.

She grows thousands of the plants right in her yard and has also made jelly out of it. Neighbors haven’t complained about the “weeds,” and she doesn’t worry that some might call it noxious.

“That’s in the eye of the beholder,” she said.