Umbellifer skeletons

I changed my lunchtime route today and ventured a bit further with a colleague. We ended up on some single track country lanes that were very soggy and had overflowing ditches. We were walking at quite a pace so I did not have time to take lots of shots of possible blips. These are last year's umbellifer heads which now look very spiky and elegant. Much of this is out of focus ( I'd also borrowed son number 2's compact camera and didn't know how the macro setting worked) but I like the shape and simplicity of the empty flower heads.

I looked up umbellifers in wikipedia to find some more common names for the picture tags and found this interesting fact about umbellifers.....
'Many plants in this family, such as wild carrot, have estrogenic properties and have been used as folk medicine for birth control'!