One of the first signs of spring in Valier is when the librarian sets out a mug-sized bouquet of “crocus” on her counter. Her sweetheart is out on the land and brings her the first wild and furry lavender chalices he finds. They bloom at approximately Easter and so are called by some “pasqueflowers.” That’s the way they show up in my “Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers” by John J. Craighead, Frank C. Craighead Jr. and Ray J. Davis. Yes, the same family so involved in grizzlies.
Grizzlies take a big interest in early blooming prairie and foothill flowers because in order for them to be “up” so early and so actively, they store energy from last summer in corms, rhizomes, tubers, and bulbs, all of which can be sorted by their formal characteristics once you dig them up. Since these little storage systems are underground (spring is an underground, even subversive, development on the prairie) grizzlies and people need to know where to dig -- it is their pretty flowers that betray them. Those big harrowing claws on a grizz are not for killing so much as for digging. The most sacred object at a truly traditional Sun Dance Medicine Lodge is the digging stick of the Holy Woman. Gardeners know how attached they can become to a tool, even if it is an antler or fire-hardened wooden stick worn to fit the hand.
It is curiously true that both the Greeks and the Blackfeet had a Persephone story, except that in the Blackfeet version, their “Persephone” is taken up into the sky and there is no mention of Demeter. Instead, the woman is cautioned not to dig up a very big turnip. She does and through the hole in the sky she sees home and becomes almost fatally homesick. No mother or lover comes for her, but her husband finally lets her go home with her by-now baby boy. She is cautioned not to let the baby touch the earth. He does and vanishes, just like Euridice when Orpheus looks back. Mythologists puzzle over these variants/similarities.
Another bulb with mythology attached is the bitterroot, which is an essential ingredient for the ceremonial soup served at Blackfeet Bundle Openings. This flower comes up on the western side of the Rockies so the Blackfeet had to trade for it. The west side tribes have a story of a group who nearly died of starvation until a woman showed them where to dig for bitterroot by looking for the small tufts of leaves before the flashy flower comes. On the east side the same sort of woman finds the little buffalo stones capable of calling the real animals. Both are about low-status people who know how to feed the group. Compare with the Christian story of loaves and fishes or possibly, in the Old Testament, manna.
Pasqueflower is a member of the buttercup family and mildly irritating or toxic, as are other buttercups. Bitterroot belongs to the purslane family, along with Spring Beauty never known to be toxic and sometimes called Groundnut. Raw, the corms are supposed to taste like radishes, but baked supposed to taste like baked potato. (Compare to exotic meats always “tasting like chicken.”) Camas is a lily and a major food which the Indians called “quamash.” A beautiful purple flower distinguishes it from “death camas” which looks very similar though it has a small pale flower. Great meadows of camas attracted the early tribes to come dig and and bake them in holes heated with stones from fires. The results were made into cakes and Lewis and Clark were grateful to get these. It was the traditional expedition to get camas that stirred up the attack and pursuit of Chief Joseph across Montana.
The biscuitroot family, which looks like little umbrellas (umbelliferae), is also made into cakes and Lewis and Clark recorded that they were happy to trade beads, buttons and trinkets in order to get them. Yampa is another wild version with a good food reputation. Other biscuitroots modern folks would recognize by their similar smell are dill, anise, carrot, myrrh, parsnip, parsley, caraway and celery.
The yellow Glacier Lily, the Frittilaries, and the Shooting Stars are the most charming of early blooming wildflowers, responding to the day length and the availability of water, so that they start blooming when the prairie is thawing and then bloom in succession up the foothills and into the alpine locations for the tourists to capture in June. Glacier lilies, which are found in this guide as “dogtooth violets,” are bright yellow and have petals curled back with a flourish. There is a variation with spots on it, predictably called a “Leopard Lily.” Fritillaries hang down like bells. At first they are yellow, but as they age, they turn red. Shooting stars or Birdbills look as though their reddish-purple petals had been pushed back by a high wind so that their center does indeed look like the beak of a bird about to peck the earth.
Versions of these plants exist in their ecological variations over much of the planet and some have been domesticated for gardens, which always means they are encouraged to be bigger, brighter, fancier and rarely eaten. Not every bulb is edible, as starving people in war zones have discovered the hard way by eating daffodil bulbs, which are poisonous. Knowing plants’ histories, their likely choice of location, their seasonal schedule, is a way of being in the world, becoming part of it all.
If you get someone who knows the local botany to walk over the prairie with you, you will learn names for these spring wildflowers that are local, an ecology in themselves tracing the fancies and memories of the people who live there. Glacier Lilies, called that here mostly because there are sheets of them in Glacier Park, are also called Fawnlilies by the sentimental and Adders-tongue by the suspicious. Fritillaries are sometimes simply “yellow bells.” Camas is “Swamp Sego” because it is closely related to Sego Lilies, which are also a good food source, especially used by the Utah Mormons when they first arrived and times were lean. The inedible but pious Pasque flower has many names: Prairie Anemone, Windflower, Blue Tulip, American Pulsatilla, and, of course, around here we just call them “Crocus.”
No comments:
Post a Comment