Field Notes––

Three For The Road: Daylily, Queen Anne’s Lace, Chicory

By Dottie Evans

While showing the red, white, and blue for Independence Day, we might also celebrate dusky orange, creamy white, and heavenly azure –– the colors of three nonnative wildflowers that have made their home on American shores.

Daylilies, Queen Anne’s lace, and chicory bloom profusely along our roadsides and in unmowed fields and pastures. They tolerate dry weather and poor soil, and they are so common that it is easy to take them for granted. But we shouldn’t.

Not only are they uncommonly beautiful, there is a bit of uncommon history attached to each one of this trio of Old World weeds.

The wild daylily springs from the genus Hemerocallis and originated in the temperate parts of Asia, Japan, Siberia, Korea, China, and Eurasia. While many color variations have been hybridized since the 1930s, most people are familiar with the yellow or orange varieties that form large colonies in sunny places and near stonewalls.

Easily transplanted, daylilies can take over if left to their own devices –– not such a bad thing since they provide almost continuous bloom throughout the month of July. Though each flower blooms for only one day, it seems there is always another swelling bud waiting where yesterday’s flower wilts on the stalk.

Queen Anne’s lace or wild carrot (Daucus carota) is so prolific it can fill a field with bobbing white disks throughout July and August. It was introduced in this country from Europe to beautify Victorian gardens and soon jumped the picket fences, escaping into the wild.

Named for the ruler of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the early 1700s, the lacey white flower bears a single blood-red floret at its center whose function is unknown. According to legend, Queen Anne was adept at lace-making, but she accidentally pricked her finger one day, and a drop of her blood fell onto the doily she was making.

Chicory (Chicorium intybus), also called blue sailor, has been used for medicine and food as long as there have been humans in Eurasia. Writings in Ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian refer to chicory as a remedy for liver, urinary and digestive problems, as well as a poultice for external inflammations.

Civil War buffs know that the Confederate Army relied on boiled chicory root for its daily coffee ration since the Northern blockade cut off their supply of genuine java beans. The taste for chicory coffee became so ingrained, however, that even today Southern coffee usually contains some chicory root. Its leaves may also be boiled for salad greens.

Unlike daylilies, chicory does not transplant well. Yet it has so many uses, its seed were brought over in abundance from Europe during Colonial times. Today, chicory seeds may be bought in bulk for $18.95/pound. That’s 426,000 seeds in case you wanted to know.

Like most of us –– with the exception of Native American Indians –– these three wildflowers did not originate on the North American continent. They came across the sea from Europe or Asia as transplants or seeds meant for Colonial gardens, or they arrived in a more random manner as stowaways –– seeds inadvertently captured in the muddy cracks of settlers’ boots, in pants cuffs, in bags of grain, or in ships’ ballast.

They have flourished here in the cleared, disturbed, and cultivated areas where humans live. It only needed for trees to be felled, soil to be tilled, roads and turnpikes to be cut through the primal forest to allow the sun to shine through.

Today, these exotic immigrants fill and beautify their adopted landscape as though they had always been here. Come to think of it, we’re all foreigners of a sort.