Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd's-needle, Venus' comb, Stork's needle) is a species of edible plant belonging to the family Apiaceae.

Leaves bi- to tri-pinnate with lobes reaching around 10mm, narrow and entire to pinnatifid, petiole broadened at base and having scarious, usually ciliate margin.

Fruit 30-70mm, more or less cylindrical, slightly compressed laterally, with strongly dorsally flattened beak 3-4 times as long as and plainly distinct from seed-bearing portion, constricted at commissure; mericarps ribbed and scabrid with forward-pointing bristles on margins; carpophore present; vittae solitary and conspicuous; pedicels almost as thick as rays, glabrous at apex; styles 2-4 times as long as stylopodium, erect; stigma tapering.

Scandix is in origin a Latin word for chervil used by Pliny the Elder, who was also the first to record the descriptive name pecten Veneris signifying 'Venus's comb'.

The English folk imagination has made of the plant the 'needle' of the following : Adam, the beggar, the clock, the crow, the Devil, the old wife/old woman/witch, Puck, the shepherd, and (more prosaically) the tailor.

The folkloric entity known as the 'Old Wife' can thus be understood in relation to the Welsh Gwrach, the Northern English and Lowland Scots Carlin and the Scottish Highland and Irish Cailleach.

Within the U.K. the plant used to be widely distributed as a weed of arable land in the Southeast of England, being found as far west as Wiltshire, but became rather rare in its former haunts, a state of affairs attributed to stubble-burning and the use of modern herbicides[4] This gloomy tale of decline was, however, qualified in 1996 by wild food enthusiast Richard Mabey, who noted that, although the plant had suffered a dramatic decline in England, beginning in the 1950s, it began to recover with the banning of stubble-burning in the early 1990s.