Victoria Weber of Bethel, Vermont, would like to add a season to our calendar. It would start after mud season and end before summer; in other words, from April to mid-June. She calls it “chervil season,” and she would like it to be the time of year dedicated to reducing the number of wild chervil plants found on our roadsides and in farm fields.
Wild chervil is in bloom during this season, although, Weber notes, it is a little late this year because of the cold spring. Its tiny white flowers grow in umbrella-shaped clusters. It has stems that branch. It grows to about three feet tall but can grow as high as seven feet. Its leaves are triangular and look strikingly like fern fronds.
“It looks like Queen Anne’s lace on steroids,” Weber says.
So, is that plant on your road wild chervil or the more familiar and less troublesome Queen Anne’s lace? Weber points out that wild chervil blooms earlier, from mid-May to mid-June, while Queen Anne’s lace blooms in July and August. Wild chervil flower clusters do not have a purple floret in their centers, while Queen Anne’s lace flower clusters do.
Wild chervil is related to cultivated chervil, an herb best known as a flavoring for soups, but it is not an escaped version of the garden chervil. Wild chervil is an entirely different species.
Wild chervil looks like many other plants, and there is confusion about its common name. This plant, a native of Europe and Asia, is known as “cow parsley” in England. Weber reports that in Massachusetts, they call honewort (a similar looking plant) “wild chervil,” and sometimes hereabout, wild chervil is known as “bur chervil.”
For the record, the preferred scientific name for this species is Anthriscus sylvestris.
If wild chervil by any name was content to be a roadside plant, there probably wouldn’t be much fuss over it. Wild chervil does have a habit of taking over, but most of our roadside plants are not native to this continent and are therefore not vital components of our native ecosystems.
Wild chervil’s bad reputation comes from the fact that it can march right into hayfields and pastures. Cows and horses don’t like it, and it doesn’t work well as a component of hay. No one knows why a plant that has been growing in this area since at least 1919 has suddenly become so aggressive.
Weber suspects that some farmers have accidentally spread wild chervil from the roadside into their hayfields by mowing near the road first and bringing the wild chervil seeds into the middle of their hayfields on their mowing equipment.
Scott Pfister, recently with the Vermont Department of Agriculture, says that wild chervil is one of several noxious weeds of concern to Vermont’s farmers. It was recently put on that state’s “watch list” of invasive plants, reports Bob Popp, a botanist with the Vermont Nongame and Natural Heritage Program.
Wild chervil can also be found in New Hampshire, though it hasn’t caused the trouble in that state that it has caused in Vermont. In fact, most of the Vermont activity is confined to the watersheds of the White River and Ottauquechee River.
Weber, a gardener and plant person, had never noticed the plant before 1996, when it caught her eye as she was driving on Vermont Route 14. She couldn’t find it in any field guides. The plant became more and more common there. Now, she says, the road is a tunnel of white when wild chervil is in bloom.
She’s noticed a common pattern when someone first becomes aware of wild chervil: “First they notice it. Then they notice it is not Queen Anne’s lace. Then they notice it’s spreading. Then they want to get rid of it.”
Weber advocates a gentle method of removing wild chervil. To take out a single plant or small group when you first see it, you can loosen the root with a narrow trowel and pull the plant up. The idea is not to disturb the soil any more than necessary, which allows non-native plants to grow, and not to crush any native plants.
Removing wild chervil is a wonderful community-building activity, she says. Invite the neighbors to join you.
Victoria Weber doesn’t hate wild chervil. “The more I deal with wild chervil, the more complex my feelings about it become.”
She can’t deny its beauty, and she admires its vitality. She doesn’t want to wipe it out. Still, she doesn’t want it to be the only plant in her life, and sometimes it appears that wild chervil is poised to take over the landscape.
“Chervil is here to teach us,” she says, “probably about ourselves.”