There are so many remarkable little things surrounding us that we fail to notice.
I grew up in upstate New York, and one of the most common weeds in my yard was Queen Anne’s lace (also known as wild carrot). It was one of the handful of wildflower species my mother taught me to identify, distinctive because of its lacy white flowers that make an elegant umbrella shape.
When I was about 32, I came across a poem about Queen Anne’s lace by William Carlos Williams. It contains the lines:
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish.
I was perplexed. What could the great poet mean by “a purple mole at the center of each flower”? I had never seen a “tiny purple blemish”. I happened to be visiting my parents, who still lived in the house I had grown up in. I went outside and looked at the Queen Anne’s lace flowers in the yard, and, indeed, every single one had a deep purple floret in its center. How had I managed to miss it all these years?
Since then, I have discovered the occasional patch that lacks the purple floret, through some genetic anomaly, but the vast majority posses it. Occasionally it is a deep maroon.
Having studied plant identification in great detail, I am much more observant than I used to be, but I am still occasionally brought up short by the discovery of some commonplace feature that I encounter for the first time. The study of nature can be humbling.
