Epilobium angustifolium

Epilobium angustifolium

Fireweed, or Epilobium angustifolium, is a beautiful plant. It has a tall flowering stalk, full of fairly large, purple flowers. The flowers bloom starting at the bottom of the stalk, and work their way up, while the top is still growing new flowers, so that it continues blooming for most of the summer.

The flowers have four purple petals, and four narrower and darker purple sepals. The prominent style (female part) is divided into four curled stigmas at the end. It has eight stamens. These are all common characteristics of the Evening Primrose family of plants (Onagraceae). It also has a long tube behind the petals where the seeds form. This will get longer after the flower fades and falls off. This is characteristic of the Epilobium genus, and this is the largest and showiest member of the genus.

I have found many sources which say that fireweed is edible, but mostly when I have tried it, I have found it very unsatisfactory. The leaves are rather bitter, and the flowers and seedpods are not much better. Some sources recommend the small amount of juicy core inside the pithy stem, but this is a very small amount of food, and it's hard to justify tearing up such a beautiful flower for that.

The key to eating fireweed turns out to be that you must eat the young stem before the flowers form. The stem will be less that 2 feet tall, and growing only new leaves at the top. The stems can vary in thickness from about 2-5mm, and you should select the thicker ones to get more food. The outer part of the stem can be very fibrous, so it may help to peel the stem. The lowest portion of the stem may have finished growing already and will have become tough and fibrous or even pithy already. So you need to find the tender section of the stem. Too low will be tough and fibrous. The bottom of the tender section will need the outer part peeled off. Higher up the stem will be thinner, but not need peeled. At the top, the stem is very thin, and consists mostly of the bitter leaves, so I usually discard that too. But the tender section is quite good tasting. It is juicy and fresh and a bit crunchy. Some sources compare it to cucumber in taste, and it is not entirely unlike cucumber in taste. The texture is more mucilaginous than fresh cucumber. If you scrape the small amount of juicy core from a mature flowering stem, you can get a good idea of the taste of the full stem when it is young.

Young plant /
close-up of leaf

The problem with eating fireweed is identifying the young stems without flowers. When flowering, it is easy to identify, because there are no other flowers quite like them. But before the flowers bloom, there are a lot of plants which look very similar in leaf shape and growth form, so it is not easy for a novice forager to identify it at that stage. To be confident in identifying young plants before flowering requires a lot of observations, usually over several years, so that once you confidently know the mature plant, you can identify it confidently at younger and younger stages. Fortunately, you can use the mountains to shorten this process significantly, because summer comes later at higher elevations. If you identify the plant at low elevation, so can hike or drive to a higher elevation and try to identify it at a younger stage. Or, if you suspect you have identified something at a high elevation before it flowers, you can try going to a lower elevation and see if you can find the same plant in bloom.

This still requires some experience with the plant to be able to identify the young stage confidently. It is difficult to explain how I do it in text, or even with pictures. But one characteristic I look for, is that the leaves, which are long and fairly narrow (lanceolate), have a semi-prominent vein all the way around the leaf, inset about a millimeter from the edge. You can see this in the picture above. This is fairly unusual, so it is helpful, but not necessarily a guarantee that you have the right plant. I have found that the youngest plants are sometimes purple in color, with the first leaves changing from purple to green as it matures. It is especially tender at this stage, but I still find it helpful to peel the stem. On the other hand, if the stem is hairy, you definitely have the wrong plant, perhaps something like Senecio serra, which grows in the same area, looks similar when young, and is at least mildly toxic.

progression
from buds
to flowers
to seed pods

But actually, my favorite use of fireweed is for entertaining children, and sometimes adults too. If you find the long thin seedpods when they are not quite mature enough to open on their own, you can pick them, and then gently roll them between your fingers, until you get them to pop open. They will suddenly spring open, releasing the tiny seeds, along with quite a surprising amount of fluffy silk material (considering how thin the seedpods are) which can carry them away on the wind. When I do this, I tell children I have a magic trick to show them. My kids have been entertained in this way for hours.