For the Love of Camassia Curb

A garden for a North American bulb

Newly planted Camassia in the curb this week.

“The quawmash is now in blume and from the colour … at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.”

🌿 Meriwether Lewis, June 12, 1806

A North American beauty

Last week I wrote about the North American native bluet, Houstonia caerulea, and how it creates a blue carpet like that of the British bluebell. Its carpet is a small one and not true blue, but still, its gives a lovely affect. But I had forgotten completely last week about a native bulb whose blue certainly stands up to the brilliance of Hyacinthoides non scripta! It is the Camassia.

On his 1806 expedition, Meriwether Lewis wrote that the camas meadows in Idaho looked like "lakes of fine clear water.”¹ Since I decided last year to devote an area of our garden to Camassia, I wanted to take a closer look at this marvelous plant, especially as it is again in bloom at Havenwood!

At the moment, there is still a nice write up about the “common camas” on the National Parks Service website:

“Standing at Weippe Prairie, in northeastern Idaho, in the summer of 1806, Lewis admired a field of blue camas flowers. Nine months before, the Corps of Discovery had arrived at this same location exhausted and near starvation after an arduous crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains. At that time, the camas had represented survival, not beauty.

Trudging out of the Bitterroot Mountains in September of 1805, the explorers entered the home of the Nez Perce. Recognizing the desperate state of the travelers, the Nez Perce offered food: berries, dried buffalo and salmon, and a bread prepared from camas root - all staples of the Nez Perce diet. Clark and the others gorged on the bread calling it “excellent”, “sweet”, “good and nourishing.” Not long after this meal, however, the explorers became quite ill. Perhaps, with empty stomachs and unaccustomed to this new food, the camas had disagreed with them.

By the following summer, as they began their journey home, the men of the Expedition, like Lewis, could appreciate the beauty of the prairie that sat at the base of daunting mountains. Remembering his mission to document the plants and people of the west, Lewis took the time to write more than 1500 words about the Camas plant. He also described the Nez Perce technique for collecting and preparing the roots of the plant.

For thousands of years, the Nez Perce made their home near Weippe Prairie and relied on the plant that once grew in abundance there. Today, the descendents of the Nez Perce who helped Lewis and Clark still harvest and roast the camas plant. With much of the Nez Perce homeland now used for agriculture or encroached upon by forests the sea of blue described by Meriwether Lewis is increasingly difficult to find. Nonetheless, tribal members, in partnership with researchers and biologists, work to preserve and expand this historic landscape.”²

Camassia quamash in our Camassia Curb this week.

More today on the botany of Camassia and our new Camassia Curb at Havenwood…

In the Asparagus family