Veratrum californicum (California corn lily, white or California false hellebore) is a beautiful but extremely poisonous riparian plant that I encountered in the Sierras. Its steroidal alkaloids can cause serious birth defects in animals such as sheep, horses, and other mammals that graze upon it. I’m guessing pregnant humans shouldn’t munch on it, either.
Lemonadeberry is native to these parts; we have a LOT growing on our block. It occurs in both chaparral and coastal sage scrub communities, enduring heat and windy conditions well.
The fruit are eaten by many birds, and the nectar feeds both birds and butterflies. The berries make a pleasingly tart snack if popped in the mouth right off the bush, and sucked for their juice. They can also be dried, then soaked in water and heated to make a kind of hot pink lemonade.
Flax, also known as common flax or linseed, has been cultivated as a food and fiber crop in temperate climates for over 9,000 years.
Linen is made from this plant’s fibrous stems, and the seed’s oil is known as linseed oil. Humans first domesticated flax in the Fertile Crescent region. Use of the crop steadily spread, reaching as far as Switzerland and Germany, China and India, where it was cultivated at least 5,000 years ago. It was grown extensively in ancient Egypt, where the temple walls had paintings of flowering flax, and mummies were embalmed using linen.
The seeds and their oil are highly nutritious, and the oil also has industrial uses. It is often blended with combinations of other oils, resins or solvents as a drying oil finish or varnish in wood finishing, as a pigment binder in oil paints, as a plasticizer and hardener in putty, and in the manufacture of linoleum.
A most useful plant indeed. And pretty!
At first I thought I had the answer, but all I got was more questions. The joys of nature journaling 💚
I find describing flavours to be very difficult. What does basil taste like? Hmm, tastes like basil.
I notice that the hydroponically grown plants from the supermarket have a milder flavour than my homegrown basil. I expect the direct sunshine and intermittent watering brings out the spice.
Wild cucumber is the first annual growth to appear with the winter rains, and it’s still going strong now, five months later, with fresh vines, flowers, and maturing fruit all festooning whatever they can scramble over. I cut a fruit open to see how the seeds are going; they are still very soft. When the fruit ripens, it will explode and spray the large, hard seeds out in all directions.
Marah macrocarpa has an unusual germination method. The initial shoot emerges from the seed and grows downward into the earth. This shoot then splits, one part swelling to form a tuber, while the second part grows back to the surface and becomes the vine. The large, hard tuberous root can reach several meters in length and weigh in excess of 100 kilograms, leading to one of the plant’s common names, manroot.
I blogged about the castor oil plant in our neighbourhood a few months ago; it’s all now flowering and setting seed, preparing for even further invasion.
While gingerly investigating the nettle, I managed to get stung under my chin. The perils of nature journaling!
Castor oil plants are having a field day around here this year — they’re crowding the roadsides and spreading in vacant lots. The plant is invasive, as well as highly toxic, and I’m not happy to see its proliferation in the Santa Monica Mountains.
However, castor oil itself has many medicinal and industrial uses. I remember it from childhood (stories, not direct experience) as a nasty laxative/purgative. Castor oil was used as an instrument of coercion under the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and by the Spanish Civil Guard in Francoist Spain. Dissidents and regime opponents were forced to ingest the oil in large amounts, triggering severe diarrhea and dehydration, which could ultimately cause death.
On the less sinister side, modern uses of natural, blended, or chemically altered castor oil products include:
• A non-freezing, pressure-resistant lubricant
• A raw material for some varieties of biodiesel
• A component of many cosmetics
• An anti-viral, -bacterial or -fungal ingredient in many ointments
• A modifier that improves the flow characteristics of cocoa butter in the manufacture of chocolate bars
• A repellent for moles and voles in lawns
Castor seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 4000 BC; the slow-burning oil was mostly used to fuel lamps. Herodotus and other Greek travellers noted the use of castor seed oil for lighting, body ointments, and improving hair growth and texture. Cleopatra is reputed to have used it to brighten the whites of her eyes.
So there you have it. An extremely useful (and quite pretty) plant — just not one I want growing around here.
hashiworks 