Given our love for the wild carrot plant, on four small ceramic plates we wanted to honor its life cycle, immortalizing its four main stages.

We imprinted them on clay, to form a small ceramic herbarium to be admired and used at the same time.

Make yourself comfortable because this series of saucers tells a story, the life of a wild carrot plant!

When it pops out of the ground, the first thing you see of the wild carrot is a clump of leaves, initially small and tender, which over time become taller and larger. The leaves are hairy, well divided and with a lanceolate outline.

The carrot plant, being biennial, during the first year of life produces only the basal rosette, while in the second year it produces the stem from which the leaves branch off.

When the leaves have become large, a stem that can reach a meter in height extends from the center of the plant towards the sky, from which a small and closed bud will grow.

The bud is surrounded by a corolla of thin bracts, that is, by particular leaves that are positioned right at the base of the umbrella, and which protect the flowers still hidden inside the bud.

The carrot flower finally opens from the bud in the middle of summer. This is actually a large convex umbel with many rays, in turn made up of small umbels with white five-petalled flowers.

Usually the central flower of each umbrella is dark burgundy, almost black, and allows you to recognize the carrot from other very similar and toxic species, such as hemlock.

The dark central flower, which is sterile, has been a mystery to botanists around the world for hundreds of years.

The most ancient believed that it was only a genetic oddity, while modern botanists are convinced that it is a clever trick of the carrot to attract pollinating insects (that is, those insects that carry pollen from one flower to another).

These, in fact, are led to think that the dark flower is an insect already resting on the flower of the carrot that is feeding, which therefore acts as a signal of the presence of nectar.

The inflorescences at full maturity, which occurs in autumn, become brown in color and close in on themselves like a bird's nest, as if to protect the fruits, which are small and ovoid in shape.

The fruits of the wild carrot are nothing but achenes, that is, two dry and leathery walls adhering to the seed, bristling with quills. The quills on the achenes make the fruits easily stick to the fur of the animals, which by transporting them around help the dissemination of carrot seeds.

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Did you like the story of the wild carrot? You can buy this limited series of little plates on the online shop!

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