>>486500...Continued.
2, unless you are making wine with the flower heads, you won't be eating any flowering Daucus carota. They only bloom in their second season of growth when the roots are far too woody to even consider eating. Daucus carota is also known as "wild carot/wild parsnip" and you eat the young tender 1st year carot-like tuber. So, flower identification during that stage isn't helpful. Another problem, like in my area, Daucus carota and Conium maculatum bloom at different tiems of the year. You never have the flowers side by side for comparison. To compound this, even different flower heads on the same Daucus carota plant can look vastly different, ones being typical with the center black speck and ones being splayed out without a black speck.
3, only using 1 part of a plant for identification can be disasterous. Again, with Daucus carota (Queen Anne's Lace) and Conium maculatum (Poison Hemlock) you need to learn to identify their leaves, stems, odor, habitats, and growth/blooming cycles. Because if you are going to be digging up and eating the 1st year, non-blooming, roots of Daucus carota, you better know what it is. The plant guides you are using had better list all the taxonomic markers for both plants.
As example, check out these images. Some are Daucus carota and some are Conium maculatum. It is obvious for some of the images but not for all of time. I personaly would not stake my life on most of the images. I'd need to see the entire plant they are attached to.
