If I didn't know better, I'd have said some prankster had been down on our new wildflower area and thrown handfuls of cooked spaghetti over some plants (see pic above). But no, this was nature at its wierdest. What we had was a couple of patches of dodder - yellow dodder to be precise (Cuscuta campestris), a parasitic annual from North America and associated especially with carrots - that had wound itself all over wild carrot and the surrounding host plants! Here's a close up of the flowers...
