Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

Bearberry

Arctostaphylos uva-ursi is best known as a medicinal herb, especially good for urinary tract infections. But it also has edible berries, called Bearberry in English. The botanical name comes from the word for Bearberry in Greek (Arctostaphylos) and Latin (uva ursi). It is also known as Kinnikinnick in some American Indian languages.

The plant is a very low growing shrub, often hugging rocks, and only getting about 6 inches tall. The leaves are fairly tough (like manzanita, a closely related plant), 1-2 inches long, and obovate in shape, which means they are pointed at the stem end, and round at the far end. In the fall, the small bright red berries will be ripe. In my region, these plants are only found at high altitudes, but farther north they are more common and can be found in Canada and Alaska. The berries are ripe in the fall when other better-tasting berries are well past their season and no longer available.

When raw, the berries are somewhat dry, have a mealy texture, and not much flavor. The become sweeter when cooked, either boiled in water or cooked with grease. The water-boiled ones are somewhat sweet, and juicier from the water, but still have a mealy texture. The ones I fried in grease were similarly sweetish, and had less of the mealy texture, but the flesh inside had shrunk during the cooking. The best flavor seems to come from cooking in oil and pounding or grinding into a coarse powder. The pounding helps break up the seeds. They are still not good tasting enough that I would want to eat it very often.

Many tribes of the American Indians ate the berries for food in various ways. Moerman's "Native American Ethnobotany" has an unusually detailed recipe:

Fruit cooked in grease, pounded, mixed with raw fish eggs, and eaten. Approximate proportions of the ingredients were 1 tablespoon grease, 1½ cups fruit, and 2 tablespoons whitefish [or salmon] eggs separated from the adhering membrane. A little sugar was added for flavor. After the fruits were lightly cooked in grease, they were pounded until they were crumbly. They were then placed in a heavy cloth folded to make a sack and pounded with the back of an ax head. The fish eggs moistened the pounded fruit.

I tried preparing the fruit according to this recipe, except that I used a coffee grinder to grind the fruit to a powder, cooked it in a small amount of grease, then used tomato guts instead of fish eggs to moisten it. I didn't have fish eggs, but I thought the insides of a tomato would have a similar texture. When prepared this way, the flavor is fairly good. It has a good sweetness from both the bearberry and the tomato, though it is hard to find a flavor to compare it to. It has the texture of coarse gruel along with a few hard bits of seed that the grinder wasn't able to pulverize completely. This method of preparation is much more palatable than my previous attempts. 

Vaccinium caespitosum

Vaccinium caespitosum

I have known there is a dwarf species of bilberry or huckleberry that grew in my region, but I never thought I would find enough of it to make it worth eating or seeking out. That has now changed. 

I was down on hands and knees picking Alpine Wintergreen (Gaultheria humifusa), a berry everyone likes a lot, when I noticed some bilberry shaped berries growing at the edges of my wintergreen patch. They were on tiny plants only 2-3 inches tall, so I realized I had found the dwarf species of bilberry, Vaccinium caespitosum, commonly known as Dwarf Bilberry. And there were several ripe berries on each little plant, so it probably produces more fruit than normal bilberries, in terms of fruit per area, although I doubt that the plant is nearly as common as the normal bilberry. It certainly is not as noticeable, because it is so small, and the berries are mostly hidden under the leaves. 

Dwarf Bilberries are worth seeking out, because the berries have a very excellent flavor. They are somewhat like the typical bilberry or huckleberry, but they also have a fresh fruity taste which is distinctly noticeable. Definitely a winner in terms of flavor.

Look for Dwarf Bilberries if you are at high elevations or north in the Rockies. They can be found growing in meadows which are not too wet or too dry, along with other plants of similar stature. If the other plants are larger, they easily get over-shaded and out-competed. It doesn't like soil as thin as alpine wintergreen thrives in, but can grow in only slightly better soil, as shown when I found it growing next to alpine wintergreen.

Saxifraga odontoloma

Saxifrage flower

Brook saxifrage is one of the most common plants found on the banks of swiftly flowing mountain brooks, and seems to need that specific environment. You might occasionally find it in boggy areas if there is a stream nearby, but never in dry areas. It is easily recognizable from the leaves which have large even teeth, like fancy edges cut into paper. The flowering stems are leafless, and have many branches with small white flowers which are very pretty to look at. The flowers have five petals, ten stamens with wide (petaloid) filaments, and a 2-parted style. The latin name, Saxifraga odontoloma, has been changed due to genetic research. Newer references will call it Micranthes odontoloma instead.

Saxifrage leaves

The leaves are edible, but even though they don't taste bad, they don't taste good either. They seem mostly tasteless to me. And the texture is rather tough, especially in older, larger leaves. They are thicker than an average leaf, so there may be more food bulk in them at least. After cooking, even for 15 minutes, they taste nearly the same as they do raw, and they are very nearly still as tough as they are raw.

So, there isn't much here to excite me to eat these often. At best, I think they could be added to a recipe to give it more food bulk, and make it more filling.

Atriplex heterosperma

Atriplex heterosperma

This post is about Orach in general (also spelled orache), although I am talking about one species in particular. Orach is a common name applied to many species in the genus Atriplex, although mainly to the more herbaceous, spinach-like species. The woody ones are more often called "saltbush", which is relevant because the plants in the Atriplex genus, including orach types, can thrive in salty environments, and often have a more-or-less salty taste to them. Orach will most often refer to Atriplex hortensis or Atriplex patula, but the species I found in my area is Atriplex heterosperma. Ultra-modern botanists will call it Atriplex micrantha, but I like the older species name because it refers to a distinguishing characteristic of the species, namely that it has two different types of seeds.

But in the broader sense, Orach refers to quite a lot of different species, and they all taste more-or-less the same, and are used the same. Even many species in the sister genus Chenopodium, such as Chenopodium album (Lamb's quarters), are used the same and taste similar. Chenopodium is separated from Atriplex by botanists, because the flowers have a different morphology. As a botanist, I want to know the exact species of what I eat, so what I did was to identify the mature plant in late summer, and then come back in the spring to pick the tender new plants. None of the oraches are toxic, so you are usually safe if you don't know the exact species, once you are familiar with this type of plant. And besides that, modern botanists have nit-picked the genus into so many species, in spite of knowing how easily they crossbreed, that they are often not able to be sure of the species either.

My particular orach, Atriplex heterosperma, is found in the spring growing in great abundance underneath the old dried stalks of last year's plants. The leaves, like all orach, are generally triangular in shape, with a few teeth that are small at the tip and larger at the base. The lower tooth might even be considered a lobe. They have a sparsely powdery coating on the leaf, which might be from exuding salty compounds that the plant does not need. The leaves are usually opposite.

The taste of Atriplex heterosperma is very good. I don't detect any bitterness at all. It is hard to tell the difference in a side-to-side taste test with Chenopodium album, but I think the Atriplex heterosperma is slightly better tasting, in that it is more mild, without any hint of bitterness. (At least in the early growths I was testing.) Just like other Oraches, it provides its own saltiness, and it is very good cooked. Even though it is tender enough to eat raw, it fries or boils without getting squishy. Frying in oil gives it an excellent flavor, and this is may favorite way to eat it, because it stands up to the cooking very well without becoming limp or squishy. We use Orach or Lamb's Quarters in many dishes, such as omelets, or soups, or fried with other vegetables. It works well in quiche or pasta dishes, or basically anywhere you might use spinach.

Lamium purpureum

Lamium purpureum

Purple Dead Nettle may be bit scary for the name of an edible plant, but this is one plant that I am liking a lot, if I cook it right. The right way to cook it is to boil it. If you eat it raw or cook it other ways, it seems fairly average in flavor.

closer view of flowers

But first, to identify it, look for a mint (square stems, opposite leaves) with purplish flowers, which are two-lipped, with spots on the lower lip. In Lamium purpureum (Purple Dead Nettle) the leaves have petioles (stems) and are clustered at the top of the stem. The uppermost leaves are usually tinged with purple color as well. On the other hand, if the leaves clasp the stem (sessile, no leaf-stems) and are more widely spaced along the stem, you have found Lamium amplexifolium (Henbit Dead Nettle). If the leaves have white spots or patches, you have found Lamium maculatum (Spotted Dead Nettle). There are also Dead Nettle species with white or yellow flowers. By most accounts, Purple is the best tasting kind of Dead Nettle.

One nice thing about these flowers, is that the sepals (green bracts at the base of the flower) are soft and edible as well. (Horehound and Motherwort are examples of mints with stiff and sharp sepals.) This means you can break off the entire top leafy part of the plant and eat or cook it whole (leaves, stem, flowers, and sepals), resulting is a larger vegetable that doesn't get lost in a stew the way individual leaves might. 

You can eat this whole top raw. It is soft instead of crisp, so not especially good as a salad green. It is a bit hairy, so the texture is not the best. But it is mild for a mint, with no strong or unpleasant aftertaste. Some describe it as earthy, which is not unfair. So expect a mildly minty, earthy flavor from it. Not bad, but also not something I would seek out for the fine flavor.

I tried cooking it in several ways. Frying in butter did not improve the flavor much. The texture is better that way, since it comes out slightly crisp instead of soft-hairy. It was pretty good cooked with egg. The flavor does not stand out, but it is a good addition to an omelet, and well worth eating this way.

The best way to cook it is to boil or steam it for about 3 minutes. I notice that the steam coming from the cook pot has an odd or funky smell at first. This may indicate that there is a volatile oil being boiled off, which can explain the change in flavor. After about three minutes, the steam seems to smell sweeter, so this is probably a good indicator of when it is done cooking. The flavor is much improved, in my opinion, and much less earthy. The boiled flavor can almost be described as sweet. The boiled version is the flavor that I want to eat more of. 

The earthy flavor seems to be left behind in the water. It is not bitter or unpleasant, so it can be drunk as a tea. It would not be a bad additional flavor to a soup or stew, so while I haven't tried it that way yet, I would not pre-boil and discard the water. I would just add them directly to the soup and wait for the volatile oils to boil off.

Mertensia brevistyla

Mertensia brevistyla

Bluebells (Mertensia species) are a very common plant, and they are edible. I'm usually not very impressed with their flavor, but accounts of successfully enjoying them say the young shoots and tips should be used for best results. Since most bluebells are shrub-sized, although not woody, it is long past the shoot stage when the flowers come out and makes them simple to identify.

However the species of bluebells pictured here neatly sidesteps that problem. Short-styled Bluebells or Mertensia brevistyla is endemic to (only occurs in) Utah and Colorado, and is a spring ephemeral, which means it is a small plant which grows early in the spring before most other plants get started, but only for a short time, and then dies off as everything else outgrows it. This means that the entire plant is nothing other than a young shoot, six inches high or less, and the flowers grow immediately to give away its identity. The appearance is a bit different than you might expect if you are familiar with the more common bluebells species, since they are quite small, and the flowers are shorter and do not hang down. They are a bit of an outlier in the genus, but still definitely a bluebell. Just like other bluebells, the flowers start out pink when young, and have the same blue color when mature. But because they more open (instead of cylindrical) than other bluebells, you can see the light-colored center of the flower, which is common in the Boraginaceae (Borage) family.

They are fairly abundant in their limited area and time of growth, but remember to practice good foraging etiquette and only take a few of the ones you find. You will get enough if you walk and bushwhack around the area. You can just break off the upper portion, which will leave the root and give it a good chance to grow again next year.

Like other bluebells, the raw leaves have a distinctive flavor, which some people describe as "fishy". This may not be entirely accurate, but it is probably as close a description as you can get with actually tasting it yourself. It is not a particularly strong or unpleasant taste, though, and these leaves are never bitter, like the older leaves on larger plants can get. Cooking removes that flavor from the leaves, and softens any fibers in the stems. So the cooked leaves together with the stems is a mild and very nice tasting green. I boiled them for three minutes, which is my standard time for most greens, but they may not need even that long. The flowers do not survive the cooking process. They looked like they turned clear in the simmering water, and washed away through the sieve when draining the water off. Some of my plants still had flowers in bud stage, and those cooked up fine, just like the leaves and stem. The raw flowers could be used as a pretty addition to a salad or as a garnish.

All of the Mertensia species are edible, with varying degrees of good taste. This is one of the better tasting species, especially when cooked. However, not everything called "Bluebells" is edible. The Hyacinthoides genus in the Lily family is also known by the common name Bluebells, but they are definitely not edible. They hang down like most bluebells, and some of the species are blue, but they have six petals instead of five, and they are never found in Utah unless cultivated. The Wahlenbergia genus grows mostly in Australia and is known as Bluebells there. There is one species which grows in North America, mainly in the southeast, but it is called Rockbell there. Campanula species are sometimes called Bluebells, but more properly called Harebells or Bellflowers. Harebells are edible. This is case where you have to fear the synonyms instead of the look-alikes.

Lomatium triternatum

Lomatium triternatum

Lomatium triternatum is a species of Biscuit Root, also known by common names such as Ternate Desert-parsley, Nineleaf Biscuitroot, Nine-Leaf Lomatium, or some variation on those names. In my locality, Cymopterus longipes is more common, so read that blog article for more information. Lomatium and Cymopterus are very closely related genera, so much so that it is difficult to know which genus some species should be placed in. But that's probably not a concern for you. 

Lomatium triternatum looks quite different from Cymopterus longipes. It has yellow compound umbels of flowers, which is characteristic of the Carrot family (Umbelliferae). And it has long slender leaves whose stalks are divided into threes (ternate), and each stalk divides a second time into three, resulting in nine leaflets, on average. Botanists call this branching pattern biternate. A triternate branching pattern would repeat the ternate branching once more, resulting in 27 leaflets, so the species name might be a bit of a misnomer, although it does invoke the thought that three times three equals nine leaflets. It grows very early in the spring, and few plants in the carrot family have such thin leaves. Orogenia linarifolia has narrow leaflets, but it is much smaller. Perideridia gairdneri has similar leaves, but they are usually withered when you find them, and the flowers are white. Lomatium graveolens also occurs in the area, but is has much, much more than nine leaflets.

The root is the important edible part of this plant, and it is very similar to Cymopterus longipes, being a long taproot, usually about a half inch in diameter, and as deep as you care to dig. The raw root has a hint of carrot flavor to it, but that goes away after drying. The raw roots are rather fibrous, so grinding the dried root into a powder fixes that problem.

The leaves have a rather resiny flavor to them, so I don't like to eat them, although some taste testers have suggested they could be used in place of rosemary.

Digging the roots can be a laborious process, especially in the rocky ground which the Rocky Mountains are named after. Rather than trying to dig down to the bottom of the root, I prefer to dig a few inches, in order to make sure I have the root and not the bottom of the stem, and to be sure where the root is and which way it is going. Then I push my hori hori down on all sides and wiggle it around a bit to loosen the soil and hopefully break the little side roots which would hold it in the ground. After that I can grab the top of the root and pull. I usually get about six inches of root this way (which coincidentally is the length of my hori hori) for only a couple minutes of digging. Any root which is deeper is left to regrow another plant.

Some root can be rather thin. These are younger plants, and the amount of root is probably not worth the digging effort. To find larger roots, look for larger top parts of the plant, of course. Larger roots will often put up more than one stem, so two or more stems growing very close together is a good sign to look for.

As I say in my other biscuit root article, the processing of the root takes several steps. 1) Peel or scrape off the dark outer layer. 2) Dry the root. 3) Grind or pound it into a powder. 4) Form it into "biscuits" of various size and thickness. 5) Bake or dry the biscuits.

Removing the dark outer layer is important because it prevents the root from drying out, which is an important thing for a desert plant. The inside is white and dries easily, either in a food dryer, or merely sitting in the open air. It will be brittle when fully dry, which helps with the powdering process. Traditionally a metate (hand grinding stone) was used, but a modern blender is much faster.

The biscuit root flour is pretty bland tasting. So when making biscuits, add salt and some sort of fat to it for flavor. The fat will also help hold it together. It has no gluten, so without the fat the biscuits are very crumbly. Try a ratio of 1 part fat to 8 parts flour, and adjust to taste. Add enough water to make a thick dough. Them form into biscuits and bake or fry them.

The taste of the biscuits is good, like a dry whole wheat biscuit. They are good to eat plain, as a side to a meal, or with some sort of jam. (Choke-cherry, Serviceberry, and Oregon Grape are good local sources for fruit to make jam from.)

Many Lomatiums were used as Biscuit Root, but not all. For example Lomatium dissectum is a well-known medicinal plant, whose root is much too resinous to be used for food.