To me, looking at this plant from underneath produces an effect that’s almost like looking at twinkly stars or at fireworks.
A quotation for today:
“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things in nature have a message you understand, Rejoice, for your soul is alive.”
~Eleanora Duse
Oh, I love this one. Wild carrot?
Not sure of the plant’s name–I found it in the herb section of the Huntington. I’ve got another (slightly less artsy) photo of the plant on flickr (click the image i this post to go to flickr) if you want to help me identify it. 🙂
Oh, if it was in the herb garden, it’s probably dill.
Before every square inch of it got paved over, Southern California used to have enormous expanses of open land, and one of the wild plants there, which also looks like this, was anise. If not dill, this might be anise. I seem to remember anise having yellow flowers, not white.
The scent would be a dead giveaway, of course. Anise smells like licorice; dill smells like, well, dill. Both have delicate, thready-ferny foliage.
Wild carrot umbels have white flowers but get quite a bit tanglier, for lack of a better word, curving themselves into little seed baskets as they develop. I think the foliage is more lace-like than thread-like, and I don’t remember it having a particular scent. It grows wild here and won’t really get going for another month or so. It’s big in late summer.
I know I have pictures of it somewhere… 🙂