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Caraway

 

 

Caraway, with its modestly small elegant flowers in umbels, flowers everywhere.

 

It is quite common in Estonia but keeps close to people, growing in plant communities influenced by humans: near farms and settlements, in meadows, at road verges. The stem of the plant is lower and thinner than that of other umbellifers, growing some twenty centimetres high in poor conditions and staying below one metre in favourable locations – thus it is difficult to find for collecting seeds in autumn.

 

But recognition is helped by the familiar smell that we feel when rubbing either the plant or the seeds between the fingers. The Cambridge milk-parsley (Selinum carvifolia) is quite similar to caraway.

 

Urmas Kokassaar has written about caraway in magazine „Eesti Loodus“ – for those who are interested, here is the  LINK (article in Estonian)