Disappearing Queen Anne’s Lace

It is summer now and in a few odd spaces I can smell something that only exists in the margins.Until recently, Queen Anne’s Lace — Daucus carota, a member of the carrot family — was a common weed in the Mississauga area of Ontario. It filled the ditches, the vacant lots, the poor scraped soil along the roadsides where nothing else would take hold. The plant grows to two or three feet, blooms midsummer, and once the sun heats the flower, releases an aromatic perfume that is, for me, the unmistakable scent of summer as it was lived in 1961, when my family arrived here.There are some commercial and boutique perfumes that mention Queen Anne’s Lace, or carrot seed or European cow parsley, but they don’t actually contain the essence of the flowery weed that grew plentifully in this area. If you want to smell that distinctive scent of summer, you will have to seek out the real thing.It is disappearing now, and I don’t think that’s nostalgia talking. It isn’t going extinct — you’ll still find…