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365 urban species: #280: Groundnut.
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urbpan. Location: on the rhododendron shrubs in the TJ Maxx parking lot, Allston.Urban species #280: Groundnut Apios americana
One of the ways this project has been good for me, is that I am constantly scrutinizing every living thing I see, and trying to determine what it is. If I see something unfamiliar, it immediately becomes a quest, a mission to identify and understand. Of course, this was something I was prone to do before this year, but the 365 Urban Species project lends a sense of urgency to my natural desire to know the living things sharing the city with me. Another benefit has been a heightened alertness of the passing of time, and of the cycle of the year. When I encountered this flower I thought that I was done seeing new flowers for the year, and that the remaining days would find me hurrying to write about trees before their last leaves fell, and searching out insects on the warmer winter days.
I was surprised again, when I learned that this plant is native to our area. Surely a creeping weed sprawled on the rhododendron shrubs in the parking lot of a strip mall is an invasive--but no. Groundnut is a climbing legume, naturally found east of the rockies. Both the seedpods and the starchy roots of the plant are edible, and were used by Native Americans. There are apparently plans afoot to develop a cultivated variety for food production.
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I painted a picture of one a while back.
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You're photos in this project are beautiful too!
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These started popping up in my backyard last year, and I dug up the roots to taste them, they were sort of like a cross between a tiny potato and jerusalem artichoke, or a sunchoke but not quite as tasty.
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Native, pretty, and edible? Sign me up!
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Thoreau on the groundnut
(Anonymous) 2006-10-11 12:07 pm (UTC)(link)Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered
the groundnut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the
aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if
I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not
dreamed it. I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom
supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the
same. Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish
taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of
Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at
some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving
grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an
Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering
vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender
and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a
myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry
back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the
Indian's God in the southwest, whence he is said to have
brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will
perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness,
prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance
and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or
Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and
when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string
of nuts may be represented on our works of art.
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