One of my favourite wild flowers is beginning its annual display.
Cow parsley turns road verges, field margins and path edges into gardens. This is one of the first of the umbellifer flowers (the plants with umbrella-shaped flower-heads) to emerge and as well as providing a beautiful, lace-like cluster of flowers, is an early nectar source for bees, butterflies and other insects.
It can be eaten when young but beware of confusing it with other similar looking flowers. It has a passing resemblance to deadly hemlock (the poison used to kill Socrates in Ancient Greece) as well as Fools Parsley (which is smaller.) Both these and other poisonous lookalikes flower later in the year.
In the Fields and Woods 