Flowers we can pick (4) – Cow Parsley

Mark 7 Comments

Jay Sands [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Cow Parsely is one of the plants that Plantlife says we can pick! It’s in the Plantlife Pickable 12.

There is lots of Cow Parsley in flower by the roadsides at the moment – our motor fumes fertilise the verges and Cow Parsley is a species that laps that up!

As a hopeless botanist – or plant-identifier – I like Cow Parsley because I usually recognise it and know what it is.

Cow Parsley has a variety of other names – like most of our plants, it seems. The nicest, which is what I remember my rather severe paternal grandmother calling this plant, is Queen Anne’s Lace. That is a lovely name and seems very appropriate for the pretty delicate umbels of this plant.

James Allan [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
Another name, far less pretty, is ‘Kek’ which seems to be a local Northants name for it.  There’s something about words that end with a hard ‘k’ sound that seems unpleasant. Although I don’t know any of them, there seem to be a disproportionately high number of swear words that end with ‘k’. I don’t expect you can think of any of them either.

Kek sounds rude, Cow Parsley sounds fittingly agricultural but rather dull, whereas Queen Anne’s Lace sounds delightful. But I am enjoying the look of this plant strung along the roadsides at this time of year although I can’t quite imagine wanting to pick it.

 

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7 Replies to “Flowers we can pick (4) – Cow Parsley”

  2. ‘Kek’ was used in North Derbyshire, maybe still is, I used to think it was the noise made when you
    snapped the stems?.
    We used to make pea shooters out of it, in the days before computer games.

  3. We, in N. Staffs in the 1960s and 70s, used to call in Queen Anne’s Lace too. I agree, much nicer name.

  4. My new neighbours in Wales are from Boston Lincs and they asked if a local plant they’d seen was Kek. As an old Wellingburian I knew what kek was but they were looking at Alexanders (Smyrnium oleastrum) another umbeliifer that grows by the coast here (introduced by the Romans apparently) . You can pick it and eat it but the taste is too strong for me.

  5. In south-central Derbyshire I was brought up to call Hogweed Keks, but yes, used for pea-shooters (better than Cow parsley as it had a bigger stem diameter)

  6. Here in Swedent one of its names is “Kex” (which also means biscuit)
    In my youth in the East Riding my father also called it Queen Anne’s Lace

  7. We called it Kek in Rutland where I grew up. I had started to doubt it though until I saw this blog!

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