Spring Beauty
I spent a fair amount of time, head down and camera in hand, searching the ground for interesting-looking plants. I was intrigued with the narrow leaves of this plant but the flower hadn’t opened yet. Still, I thought it was pretty. It is a Spring Beauty plant, much loved by Native Americans because the tuber has a chestnut-like flavor. Another name for the plant is the “fairy spud”. It is native to eastern North America but in some states it is becoming rare, due to over-harvesting. In Massachusetts, it is listed as an endangered plant. Since it is easy to grow, this should not be the case. A good place to obtain native wildflower plants, including Spring Beauty, is from Gardens of the Blue Ridge, in Pineola, NC.
The All Creatures website has a lot of very detailed pictures of the Spring Beauty flower.
Spring Beauty (claytonia virginica)
Very interesting posts, Jeff. Thanks to you (and Fred) for this information. I was particularly interested in the burdock, as we have lots and lots of them here. I must confess that we consider them a terrible pest because they always seem to pop up most in our flower and vegetable gardens and they have an unbelievably deep and thick root system so they’ve very hard to eradicate. Maybe we should look into the possibility of burdock salad!
🙂
We had lots of Spring Beauty at our place in Boone (we had deep woodland there). I miss seeing it very much. So fascinating that its tubers are edible! I really love the name “fairy spud.” I also miss all the Mayapples that we had there. It always seemed to me that there should be little fairies dancing under those umbrella leaves!
How did you learn so much about plants?!? Very impressed with your ID talent 🙂