WildeHerb is a collection of wild herb and wildflower sightings.
Edible Plants
Edible plants range from wild raspberries and elderberries to Oswego tea and mustard greens. Plants native to North America are of particular interest.
Partridgeberry, Mitchella repens, is a member of the Madder Family, Rubiaceae. It’s one of the plants that just make me think, “Forest Flowers.” You won’t find it growing anywhere else but in a forest or perhaps in a shade garden. Partridgeberry is native to the Eastern North America.
The terminal white or pink trumpet-like flowers are fragrant. The four petals are fuzzy-looking due to hairs on the inside of the petals. Twin flowers seem to be connected at their bases by a common stipule.
Small, rounded opposite leaves and twin flowers of partridgeberry.
Stems are creeping with small, opposite, leathery, round evergreen leaves. Leaves usually have a light-colored midrib and sometimes the other leaf veins stand out with a lighter color. Leaves are otherwise dark green and entire, or untoothed.
Low-growing partridgeberry with its twin flowers.Partridgeberry on the forest floor with old oak leaves. Photo taken 3 June 2010.
Twin flowers coalesce into a single red berry that may last through winter and remain at the tip of the vine until Spring. Peterson’s Edible Plant Guide tells us the berry is edible – it just doesn’t taste like anything. The tasteless berries can be used as a survival food or added to salads for a bit of color.
Partridgeberry does seem to have medicinal properties. A leaf or berry tea was used historically for treating female problems, such as irregular or painful periods and childbirth pain, which lent partridgeberry the nickname Squaw Vine. Astringent qualities of the tea led to its external use for skin irritations and as a wash to soothe arthritis.
About five years ago we went to a Native Plant Sale held at Millersville University, Lancaster County, PA. We picked up two native plants, Wild Ginger and Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana.
Wild ginger is much more plentiful in the wild, at least in the places we’ve looked. The wild ginger we planted has spread out a little bit and the original plant carried its flower from earlier this year until the second week of June. Spiderwort flowers beautifully in the later part of May into June.
Greenery of the spiderwort plant rises up early starting in April. Photo below taken 11 April 2010.
Leaves of spiderwort are already up 8-10 inches.Spiderwort greenery getting taller.
A couple of weeks later (23 April 2010) the foliage is over a foot tall. The linear leaves arch over as they get taller. It will take 2-3 weeks from this stage for the spiderwort to start blooming. Check out how small this spiderwort plant was in 2006.
Many purple-blue flowers of spiderwort.
This year I should have staked up the plant as it got heavy with blooms and now is laying over to the side. The flowers are still really pretty!
Heavy blooms of spiderwort made the flower stems bow down to the ground.
Didn’t get flowering pics until 31 May 2010. Spiderwort flowers were blooming until 11 June for a 2-3 week blooming period for 2010.
Younger plants may have fewer flowers open at one time. Each bloom lasts for a day and then only in the morning. The blossoms wilt and turn to jelly by mid-day.
Note the stamens with golden-yellow anthers, fuzzy purple hairs, and the flower pistil with a round end or stigma in center of bloom. Note that the lower left flower has four petals instead of the typical three – only saw one flower with four petals out of about 80 blossoms. Click on any of these photos for a larger view.
Purple spiderwort flowers are hairy in the center.Beautiful spiderwort flowers!
The flowers are so pretty that people used to make them into candy. Peterson’s Edible Plant Guide says all you have to do is rinse the flowers with water, dry gently, brush with egg white and coat with sugar. Not sure the effort would be worth the taste, but at least they’d be real pretty!
I’m wondering if the wild temperatures we had this spring affected the blooming time of our Black Cherry trees. We know that extremes in weather conditions will alter blooming times for many flowers and prohibit flowering altogether in some cases. Each year we wonder if the cherry blossoms will bloom during the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC.
2010 has been a wild roller coaster ride as far as temperatures go. We’ve had swings from 20 degrees above to 20 degrees below the average high temperatures. Surely, the blooming times of some plants were affected. A point in case is the Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida. Its flowering was next to nil for 2010. Very few wild flowering dogwood trees bloomed in our immediate area. The same observations were seen as far away as Virginia, where the dogwoods did not bloom heavily as in previous years, if at all.
It’s easy to draw conclusions, but we really don’t know for sure what causes certain plants to really put on a show one year and barely be apparent the next. Without a proper study one can always find an alternate explanation. Perhaps the accumulation of necessary nutrients takes longer in some years affecting their reproductive cycles. Is that why we have bumper crops of acorns in some years and not so many in other years?
Last year was a great year for the Maple-Leaved Viburnum in our forest. They flowered most beautifully.
Certainly, temperature does have something to do with blooming times, at least for some plants, like cherries. By the way, the cherry blossoms in Washington were right on time for 2010 with a 10 day blooming period and a blooming peak on March 31.
At any rate it is interesting to see changes from year to year. Just observe the same plants over a several year period, you’ll be able to learn a lot from your little green friends.
2010 was a great flowering year for the wild cherry trees of the genus Prunus.
Saplings that are about an inch in diameter and about 12-15 feet tall, flowered the most this May that we have ever seen them. Perhaps these little trees just got big enough to flower that much. Maybe the rain and temperatures were optimal for flowering of the cherry trees in our locality. We can’t say with certainty what caused the exquisite blooming, but we can say it was a good blooming year for our little wild cherries.
Black cherry flowers in elongated clusters.Black cherry blossoms.
We were lucky to see so many blossoms of wild cherry this year.
Flower buds opening on a cluster of black cherry blossoms.Cluster of black cherry flowers.
Two similar wild cherry trees grow in the same type of habitat at the edge of the woods or in recently cleared areas. To decide whether the flowering cherry trees we’re looking at are Black Cherry or Common Chokecherry, we need to look at the margins of the leaves. Are the teeth sharp or blunt? If the teeth are sharp, we have the Common Chokecherry, Prunus virginiana. If the teeth are blunt, we’re looking at the Black Cherry, Prunus serotina.
Consider the overall shape of the leaf. Is it elongated and pointed, or more squat with a short tip? Black cherry leaves are elongated, lance-like, and have 13 or more lateral leaf veins. Common chokecherry leaves have fewer leaf veins, 8 – 11, and are short-pointed at the tip.
To verify these identifications, note whether the fruits retain the calyx lobes (of the old sepals) at the top of the fruit next to the stem. If the cherry does not retain the calyx lobes, it is a common chokecherry. If the cherry retains the calyx lobes, it is a black cherry.
Common Chokecherry
Black Cherry
leaves with sharp teeth
leaves with blunt teeth
leaf vein pairs 8-11
leaf vein pairs 13+
short pointed leaf tip
fruit with no calyx
fruit retain calyx lobes
Fruit from either tree is edible, if somewhat bitter. Grolier’s Field Guide to North American Trees tells us that every three or four years black cherry trees have a bumper crop of fruit. If the birds let you have enough, why not make some wild cherry jelly?
Our black cherries here are gaining size, but they’re still green. It seems that many of the flowers don’t produce fruit at all because of the few number that reach maturity. Has anyone seen a cluster of wild cherry fruit that was as long as the flower cluster? Typically, you’ll see two or three ripe berries for each cluster of a few dozen flowers.
Three cherries left on the stem.
The green cherries aren’t ready to eat of course, but you can see the retained calyx lobes at the top of the fruits, near the stem. Photo above taken 31 May 2010. Note the blunt teeth at the leaf margins and many side veins in the leaf, which indicate this to be a Black Cherry.
In reality you’ll probably never get enough wild cherries to make jelly. Besides many kinds of birds, raccoons, rabbits, squirrel, deer and bear will eat cherries. One of our black cherry trees didn’t bear any more fruit than three cherries on the whole tree, even though it flowered beautifully as seen in the first two images in this post.
I’m curious…does anyone out there use wild cherries for food or to make jelly?
A couple of years ago I found a cluster of yarrow growing in the backyard. I noticed the foliage when the plants were small, maybe half a foot tall. Rubbing a leaf released the “flower arrangement” scent that confirmed I was looking at Yarrow, Achillea millefolium.
Learning the scents that plants make is only secondary to learning their physical characteristics to identify them. Sometimes you can cut to the chase by smelling the flowers or leaves, but if you can recognize a plant’s scent then you’re probably already familiar with it in other ways.
The yarrow plant has very highly divided leaves. The leaves are soft to the touch and arch over instead of being erect. The fern-like leaves are probably how most people would identify yarrow, instead of using its smell.
Foliage and flower buds of native yarrow.
Yarrow that was transplanted into a flower bed has flourished into many plants from the original few. Note the foliage in the image above, taken 2 May 2010.
Flowers and leaves share the same stem. Yarrow flowers seem to be formed early and rise up higher as more leaves continue to develop. When the plant gets 1 – 3 feet tall the blossoms will be fully formed into a slightly rounded cluster of what appears to white, five petal flowers. The flowers are actually composite flowers with only a few broad ray flowers, most often five of them.
A cluster of yarrow flowers.A side view of a patch of yarrow flowers.
Two photos of yarrow flowers taken 31 May 2010.
Yarrow is a plant that is used widely in flower gardens and in fresh-cut and dried flower arrangements. White is the original, native flower color, but other colors have been propagated.
Peterson’s Edible Plant Guide indicates that yarrow leaves are often used to make tea. The pleasant flower arrangement scent is a nice addition to other herbs or used alone. Check out yarrow herbal remedies to learn more about how others use yarrow in herbal remedies.
Some of the alien plants aren’t all bad. They’re here because humans brought them here, either on purpose or by accident. We’re stuck with them, so why not try to enjoy the aliens or non-natives?
If we see there is direct competition, we may be able to help our native friends out. For instance, when the garlic mustard gets too numerous along the lane, we just walk down the lane, pull out the plants, and let them lay on the road. They’re shallow rooted and very easy to pull up, especially in the Spring when there is a lot of moisture to the ground.
The plants left to lay in the road should dry up and not be able to grow more or set seeds. I enjoyed seeing that the ‘keepers of the forest’ at Little Buffalo State Park do the same thing. On my trail walks there I’ve seen the pulled out garlic mustard plants withering in the middle of the trail.
After pulling up the garlic mustard plants there will be fewer plants the following year. They won’t be extinguished as there are very short plants, maybe six inches tall, that bloom and most likely set seed. The little plants more easily hide from us weed-pullers, so they probably will help to produce the following generations.
Another alien plant that blooms prolifically and will always be here is the mustard plant. The Peterson Wildflower Guide tells us there are several alien mustards, Brassica spp., in the Eastern U.S. – white mustard, charlock, black mustard, chinese or indian mustard, and field mustard. You have to look at the foliage to determine the species.
Bright yellow four-petaled flowers in terminal clusters and slender erect seed pods are common characteristics of mustards. When you have a mass blooming of mustard in open fields, it surely gives a lot of color to the landscape.
Yellow blossoms of mustard fill this open field.Mustards flowering in a fallow field.
Of course, the mustards are edible. If one was the industrious type she could harvest the young leaves for cooked greens or salads. The older leaves are too bitter, so collecting mustard leaves has to be done on the earliest warm days of Spring. The seed pods can be pickled and the ripe seeds can be ground to make a spicy mustard.
Probably the first thing noticeable about yellow stemmed violets would be their heart-shaped leaves. The leaves branch off each other which gives a nice effect of producing a clump of heart-like leaves. Each leaf stands apart from the other as to make the heart-shaped outlines very obvious.
Heart-shaped leaves of Downy Yellow Violet.
Stemmed violets have both flowers and leaves produced on the same stem. The differences between several yellow-stemmed violets come down to leaf shape.
The yellow stemmed violet that we have here is called the Downy Yellow Violet, Viola pubescens. Two identifying characteristics are first, the downy or softly hairy surface of the stems and leaves, and second, the toothed stipule, which is like a tiny leaf at the base of the heart-shaped leaves.
Toothed stipules of downy yellow violet.
Note the yellow circle around the toothed stipule (hard to see the teeth in this image) and the downy hair on the leaves and stems.
The flowers appear differently depending on the angle that you view them at. Looking down on the violet you’ll see four petals, sideways you can see the spur and straight on gives you a look at the lined lower petal.
Looking down on the yellow stemmed violets.Top-side view of the Downy Yellow Violet.
Yellow violets seem common in low-lying areas near creeks or wetlands. Blooming cohorts included white violets, the common blue violet, miterwort, wild ginger and wild stonecrop. Bloodroot and trout lily had already bloomed in this area. Photos were taken 30 April 2010 near the Day Use Area of Little Buffalo State Park in Newport, PA.
These pretty violets – and all members of Viola – are edible, but the Peterson Edible Plants Guide tells us that the yellow species may be mildly cathartic, which means that they may act as a laxative. The young leaves and flowers can be added to salads. The leaves can be used to thicken soups, boiled as a cooked green, or dried to make tea.
Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is quite noticeable this time of year as its enormous leaves dominate the wetlands. Go driving around the countryside and where there are creeks, backwaters, or the edges of rivers in woodlands look for the very large, bright green leaves of this perennial plant.
Patch of skunk cabbage near a drainage creek at Little Buffalo State Park.
Skunk cabbage occurs in the wetland areas near the Mill Race Trail where you can see other spring ephemeral flowers at Little Buffalo State Park, Perry County, Pennsylvania. (Photo taken 3apr2010.)
Close-up image of skunk cabbage plants in a wetland area.
No flowers are visible in this image of skunk cabbage plants growing at the creek’s edge. (Photo taken 3apr2010.)
The flower of skunk cabbage is a strange one. It is the earliest flowering plant of the season by coming up as early as February. Actually, several very small flowers are grouped together in a special structure. Pollinated by flies, these posies stink like rotting flesh some say, but I don’t have any experience to make that comparison. Let’s just say, skunk cabbage has an appropriate name!
Skunk cabbage flowers appear to be miniature yellow fringes dotted on a ball which is housed safely inside a leathery sheath. The sheath is referred to as the spathe and the ball of flowers inside the spathe is called the spadix.
As the flowers become pollinated and the growth activity of the plant continues, the temperature inside the spathe becomes warmer than the ambient temperature. It gets so warm in fact that skunk cabbage flowers have been observed to melt snow from around the plant.
Skunk cabbage leaves and flower next to a creek.
The spathe in the image above – at the lower right of the plant – shows the typical mottled colors of maroon, brown, yellow and light green. The spadix cannot be seen through the opening of the spathe in the image above, but the tiny flowers are visible (in person) if you inspect inside the spathe.
Peterson’s Wildflower Guide lists skunk cabbage under both green and miscellaneous brown flowers. (Remaining photos taken 5apr2010 at Edgar’s Creek.)
Flowers are barely noticeable at the base of the skunk cabbage leaves.
The skunk cabbage plants in this creek-side group are large enough or old enough to have flowered. Note that the yellow-circled areas mark the flowers at the base of the leaves.
Leaves of skunk cabbage rise out of the ground all rolled together and rise up vertically as they emerge from the ground.
Skunk cabbage leaves emerge rolled up and unfurl into huge oval shapes.
As the leaves get bigger and bigger they open up more and more. Skunk cabbage leaves are enormous as they can grow 1 – 3 feet long and half as wide.
Crushing a leaf releases the same rotten odor that the flower gives off. Nobody wants to eat this cabbage! However, Peterson’s Edible Wild Plants Guide tells us that the thoroughly dried leaves collected in very early spring can be used as a cooked green or reconstituted in soup. CAUTION – If the leaves are not dried well, calcium oxalate crystals – which are removed only by drying completely – will burn and cause inflammation. In fall the roots can be collected and dried completely to make a flour.
The box huckleberry is either tasteless or sweet like a blueberry depending on what you read. It’s evident that somebody has tasted the wrong berry or misidentified their berry.
Blueberries are similar to huckleberries. There are several types of each plant, so one would expect that they don’t all taste the same. It seems that the plentiful huckleberries of the Northwest might be different than the box huckleberry of Pennsylvania, especially in regards to taste.
Since the fruits are similar recipes using blueberries could be used interchangeably with huckleberries. If the huckleberries are not sweet, adjustments will have to be made.
Ok. So I probably won’t be making huckleberry pie anytime soon because the fruit won’t ripen for a month or more, but I did want to collect a few links about eating huckleberries or using them in the kitchen somehow.
We look forward to the box huckleberry fruit ripening in June. If that doesn’t pan out, we could always use these recipes with the blueberries we have growing out back.
tells us that every three or four years black cherry trees have a bumper crop of fruit. If the birds let you have enough, why not make some wild cherry jelly? 
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c52efeee-5e11-4f8a-9bcb-e3f9648efded)
tells us there are several alien mustards, Brassica spp., in the Eastern U.S. – white mustard, charlock, black mustard, chinese or indian mustard, and 
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=63065afb-8a3e-4582-97cd-f5b4f1bafe8d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=820ba929-6f9e-4687-9d32-c3df1a8540cd)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=30053a06-b8be-4072-90fe-0b369aa07a3a)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0e92960e-6be7-4ae4-912c-83721c0b601d)