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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
entry from field notes dated July 2, 2022, taken on Cerro de la Cruz, at an elevation of ~2885m (~9465 ft), just south of the community of El Pinar, Amealco de Bonfil, Querétaro, MÉXICO, (~N20.17°, ~W100.17°)
"TROPICAL" WILD CARROT
In the oak forest covering Cerro de la Cruz's lower eastern slope, on the banks of a ravine where a tree-fall opened the canopy a little, the above herbaceous plant with ferny leaves was shaking in the wind.
The plant must have already flowered because only small, green, immature fruits appeared in the inflorescence. The herbaceous nature of the plant, the structure of the inflorescence, and the ferny leaves all pointed to one plant family: The Parsley/Carrot/Celery Family, the Apiaceae, which some authorities call the Umbelliferae. The name "Umbelliferea" points to the signal feature of the family, which is that the flowers and fruits of its species are arranged in umbel-type flower clusters. An umbel is a flower cluster in which stalks of nearly equal lengths arise from one point on a stem-like peduncle, to form a flat or curved surface. The above picture shows exactly what an umbel is, in this case a "compound umbel," with the stalks of the first division sprouting second-division stalks, tipped with "umbellules." And those umbellules bore fruits looking like this:
Important to notice here, and barely visible, is that the stiff hairs covering the fruits are hooked at their tips. They're "uncinate."
It's always a pleasure to encounter new-to-me species of the Parsley Family because the family is famous for its spicy and edible species, such as anise, asafoetida, dill, celery, caraway, carrot, coriander, cumin, fennel, parsnip, and more. It's a big family, with maybe between 250-455 genera and 3300-33,700 species, with many species having no fragrance, and which one wouldn't eat. Some species will kill you, as with the hemlock that Socrates drank.
In the Parsley Family, often features of the schizocarp-type fruit are more important for identification than features of the flower, and that's a little unusual in the world of plant identification. A schizocarp is a dry fruit that when mature splits into "mericarps," and mericarps are dry, fruit-like sections containing one or more seeds. A few other plant families produce schizocarps, too, such as the Hibiscus Family. A distinction of Parsley Family schizocarps is that they break into only two mericarps.
Our plant's leaves were classic "pinnately decompound" ones, meaning that they were divided like a feather, with a main central midrib, and the first divisions off that midrib were subdivided into divisions that themselves were subdivided. And I'm ashamed to say that even seeing this I wasn't quite sure what I had.
For, at least in our area, if you have a member of the Parsley Family with such pinnately decompound leaves, and fruits bearing hooked hairs, quite simply you have a carrot. A carrot as in the genus Daucus, the carrot genus. My problem in recognizing our plant as a carrot plant was that somewhere I'd learned that Daucus is strictly an Old World genus. Certainly the weedy Wild Carrot or Queen Anne's Lace I grew up with, Daucus carota, was an invasive Eurasian weed, and the garden carrot is derived from that species. But our little carrot looked very natural and very native there in the oak forest on Cierro de la Cruz.
It was DAUCUS MONTANUS, which some sources in English call Wild Carrot, but that's also the name of the North American weed, so I think of this as the "Tropical" Wild Carrot. "Tropical" is in quotation marks because no one else seems to use that name. It's "Tropical" because of its distribution from most of upland Mexico south into western South America as far as Chile and Argentina. In Mexico the species is described as inhabiting highland oak and pine forests, especially disturbed areas such as our tree-fall spot in the ravine.
So, the genus Daucus is more than the wild and garden carrot. Currently about 25 species are recognized, with the center of diversity being northern Africa and southwestern Asia. In the Macaronesia archipelago, there are "rosette treelet" carrots.
Various lists of edible and medicinal plants can be found listing Daucus montanus, but I find no reports in which the species is singled out as a food or medicine source.
Here we have just another little plant that, despite its pedigree, lives unnoticed by nearly everyone, while stabilizing and enriching the soil in its tiny corner of the Universe, spewing out its modicum of oxygen for us breathers, and ready to give up its body to any herbivore who might gulp it down hardly noticing.
I can just visualize Humboldt and Bonpland seeing nothing special at all about it when they introduced it to science. They were the first to collect it scientifically during their climb up the Silla de Caracas during a visit to Caracas, now in Venezuela, during December of 1799 and January of 1800. They climbed the Silla because its vegetation zones changed dramatically with the elevation -- the quickest way to collect a variety of species. They were climbing hard, "bailing hay," as it's called when botanists grab everything they can at the precious moment, for later study. And surely when they snapped up this American carrot, they didn't even notice that it was truly an American carrot.