Rubus parviflorus

Rubus parviflorus

Thimbleberries are one our favorite treats in the mountains. My daughter is especially fond of hiking when they are in season, usually ripening in August and September. They are closely related to raspberries, and taste somewhat tart, like a velvety raspberry.

They are easy to identify. When ripe, the resemble a raspberry, but the individual juicy segments of the fruit are smaller, and there are more of them, in a thimble shape, wider and shallower than raspberries. The leaves are quite large, around 8 inches wide, and the stems are unarmed, lacking the prickles that raspberry bushes have. In the spring, there will be large white flowers, from which the berries will form. The berries are white when unripe, bright red when ripe, and dty out as the age.

The berries are quite soft and fragile, but they come off of the receptacle easily. They are best eaten right off the plant, either by gingerly pulling the berry off with your fingers (and inevitably getting red-stained hands), or biting/sucking it off directly into your mouth.

I have never tried collecting the berries for jam or any other purpose, because they are so fragile and would not travel well. One would have to pick them directly into a clean mason jar, and plan to make jam, or perhaps a real velvet cake, very soon after picking.

Oxyria digyna

Oxyria digyna

OK, this is probably not a plant you will be eating very often. Mountain Sorrel (Oxyria digyna) grows in high alpine habitats (about 9000 feet and upwards), so unless you are stranded on top of a rather high mountain with no way down (down is easy; there's always a way down), there won't be much demand for it.

But I was fortunate to find an area with a good amount of healthy, tender Mountain Sorrel thriving, so it was a good time to give it a try.

The leaves when raw have a fresh, lemony taste, very much like members of the Rumex genus, but with no bitterness at all. Even so, I personally find the lemon flavor rather strong, but it might work well mixed with other greens. If you like raw Curly Dock, you will probably like this even more.

I tried boiling the leaves for about 3 minutes, because I had excellent results with cooked Curly Dock leaves. Cooking had mixed results. The bad news is that the bright green leaves turn a darker grayish-green as soon as they hit the hot water. The good news is that, just like Curly Dock, the cooking tones down the lemon flavor, and as long as you don't mind the color and limpness of the leaves, the taste is rather good. I would eat much more if the color were better... and it was more common... and it grew a few thousand feet lower...

close view of leaves and seeds

To identify this plant, first be in a very high, alpine environment. As I said, you are only likely to find this at 9000 feet and upwards. It appreciates wet places, but with all the precipitation being squeezed out of the clouds as the air moves over the mountain, it is not restricted to such places, and is often found in rocky outcroppings as well. The leaves are all basal and are about three quarters or more of a circle. The seeds are very distinctive. Unlike their cousins, the docks (Rumex species, which have three wings on seeds), these seeds have two wings so they can lay flat. They also develop a bright red color on the outside fringe of the wing.

Rudbeckia occidentalis

Rudbeckia occidentalis
(with pollinator)

Western coneflower is the most common coneflower in the mountains where I live. Unlike most other coneflowers, it lacks the showy ray-flowers that other species have at the base of the cone, such as black-eyed susans or cut-leaf coneflower. This can make it hard to identify using a botanical key, because they don't put the Rudbeckia genus in the division of Compositae which has disk flowers only. On the other hand, once you recognize it as a coneflower, there isn't any other species it could be.

I enjoy eating these young coneflowers occasionally. One should eat the very young cones, about and inch or less tall. The larger flowers become pithy and tough inside. The young flowers are tender enough to eat, and have a vaguely minty flavor.

The leaves are very bitter; not recommended. They might be better in the spring, if one can learn to identify them when they are young.

A related species (Rudbeckia laciniata) is known as "Sochan" to the Cherokee Indians. They used the early spring leaves and shoots. There are reports of them being good tasting but they do not grow this far west.

Michael Moore [Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West, p. 93] describes good results with using Rudbeckia laciniata similar to how one uses Echinacea for colds and flus. His comments are intriguing. "Unlike Echinacea, lance-leafed Coneflower stimulates secretions, respiration, and the skin and kidneys, thereby helping to excrete the very waste products its immunostimulus help create." A closely related species like Rudbeckia occidentalis is likely to have similar effects. Moore uses the roots and sometimes the leaves for medicinal purposes.

Thistle roots

Everyone in Utah knows that the early Mormon pioneers learned to dig Sego Lily bulbs from the Indians, in order to survive during the first years in Utah. It seems that few people have actually looked up those references, because most of them say the Indians taught them about Thistle roots at the same time they taught them about Sego Lily bulbs. Even though Thistle roots are much more common, and very much easier to dig up, Sego Lily has become the state flower, while Thistles are an undesirable weed. I wonder which the pioneers really ate more of?

Most common thistles are members of either the Circium genus or the Carduum genus, but there is a whole tribe, called Cynareae, which contains the extended thistle family, including star thistles, sow thistles, and other thistle-like plants. Thistles tend to be biennial, growing a low rosette of leaves the first year in order to store up energy in the root and then using that energy during the second year to send up a large flowing seed stalk. This all means you want to dig the root when the plant is in the rosette stage, and the biggest roots will be found either in the fall or in the early spring. After the seed stalk starts forming, the root is likely to be woody and inedible. (If you have ever let carrots overwinter in your garden and tried eating them the second year after the seed stalk forms, you will know what I mean.) Since plant taxonomy relies mainly on the flower to distinguish between species, this also means you might not be able to identify the exact species you are digging up. And this is not of much concern, since most common thistles are culinarily interchangeable, along with several genuses of similarly thistle-y plants, such as Cnicus (blessed thistle), Silybum (milk thistle), and Onopordum (scotch thistle). Most of the other genuses in the tribe look less like the classic thistle or do not grow in this area.

Thistle rosettes are easy to find and not very difficult to dig up, especially if you are wearing gloves. If you are not wearing gloves, just dig up the rosette as much as you can, grab it by the root, and cut off the leaves.

I experimented first with the roots of thistle, since it was spring and while the rosettes are common, the tall stalks are not. While digging them up, I often only got the top part of the root, leaving the long thin lower portion of the taproot still in the ground. I found out this was actually a good thing because those thinner parts of the root are too tough to eat, even after cooking. Raw, the roots were very tough, but could be eaten if cut into thin enough pieces. The taste was fairly bland, not bitter at all, but the toughness made me want to cook it.

After cooking for about 20 minutes, the roots had softened up and were edible. The large roots softened the most, and could be eaten like a carrot by biting off pieces. Middle sized roots were still rather fibrous, but could be eaten easily enough after chopping into pieces. Small roots were still too tough and woody to eat at all. The flavor was good enough although not exceptional. Perhaps somewhere between the taste of spinach and cauliflower, with no bitterness and even tending toward the sweet side. I noticed that the crown of the root, where the leaves join together, is especially tender and tastes better too.

Another way to enjoy thistles, is to eat the central vein of the leaf. The leaf must be picked from the plant, and the sides of the leaf with all the spines stripped off. This is fairly easy to do with gloves or with a knife, and less easy but possible with bare hands. The taste is a lot like celery, with a little bit of bitterness, but it still makes a good snack while on the trail. The smooth-skinned thistles are much better for this than the ones with a lot of hairs.