Garden

Eating as if I live here

A furtle of my kitchen pantry this morning as I looked for the salt tumbled onto the counter chile guajillo, asafoetida, urfa biber, sumac, and all the spices from the Moluccas that the European maritime powers once vied to control. I was quite pleased with myself at finding the staples of various cuisines in my cupboard, as they suggest gustatory promiscuity at our table, but had this picture from yesterday in my camera of the Oregon grape in our backyard, a plant that I know has been a staple of the diet of Coast Salish peoples but that I have never eaten, despite having spent my childhood in the forests of western Washington. I can make tabbouleh from ingredients on hand, yet am entirely untutored on the matter of the food growing outside the window.

The plant is not a grape at all but a bush in the barberry family that has edible berries resembling grapes. Its range is from British Columbia to Arizona and the Pacific Coast to Nebraska, but its use as an ornamental plant in gardens means it has been introduced well beyond its native territory: it is listed as an invasive species in the southeastern United States.¹ Indigenous people combined the astringent berries with salal as ingredients for making pemmican. They used the bark and root to make yellow dye for baskets and other goods. Its parts were used to make concoctions, decoctions, and infusions to treat a wide variety of human ailments, from infections to sores. Meriwether Lewis described the plant in his journal on February 12, 1806, and collected a sample, which today is in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia.² In 1899, the Oregon grape was chosen as the state flower of Oregon.³

My failure ever to have eaten the berry of the Oregon grape is chiefly due to my not wanting to die because I misidentify the plant and instead sate myself on, say, pokeweed. This is the same aversion that keeps me from foraging for mushrooms. As Euripides portrays Orestes saying, I think that Fortune watcheth o’er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his gods strive for him equally.⁴ I prefer to find my food in places where I am reasonably certain it has been given at least a cursory examination by people who know whether the label on the package is accurate, and Oregon grape is not in the produce section at the neighborhood store. I expect the Penates to safeguard my household goods, but prefer a more rigorous means of ensuring my own welfare than dependence upon tutelary deities.

All of this makes me interested in procuring a supply of the berries for use as an ingredient in something. The internet says preserves and jellies are a common application for them. I may need to sign up for a plant identification course or find an adventurous greengrocer and invite some folks over for dinner.

  • Invasive Plants of the Thirteen Southern States, University of Georgia Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health (2004), accessed August 9, 2025
  • There are two species of ever green shrubs which I first met with at the grand rappids of the Columbia and which I have since found in this neighbourhood also; they grow in rich dry ground not far usually from some watercourse. the roots of both species are creeping and celindric. the stem of the 1st is from a foot to 18 inches high and as large as a goosqull; it is simple unbranced and erect. it’s leaves are cauline, compound and spreading. the leafets are jointed and oppositely pinnate, 3 pare & terminating in one, sessile, widest at the base and tapering to an accuminated point, an inch and a quarter the greatest width, and 3 inches & a ¼ in length. each point of their crenate margins armed with a subulate thorn or spine and are from 13 to 17 in number. they are also veined, glossy, carinated and wrinkled; their points obliquely pointing towards the extremity of the common footstalk.— The stem of the 2nd is procumbent abot the size of the former, jointed and unbranched. it’s leaves are cauline, compound and oppositely pinnate; the rib from 14 to 16 inches long celindric and smooth. the leafets 2½ inches long and 1 inch wide. greatest width ½ inch from their base, to which they are regularly rounded, and from the same point tapering to an accute apex, wich is mostly, but not invariably tirminated with a small subulate thorn. they are jointed and oppositely pinnate, consisting of 6 pare and terminating in one, sessile serrate, or like the teeth of a whipsaw, each point terminating in a small subulate spine, being from 25 to 27 in number; veined, smooth, plane and of a deep green, their points tending obliquely towards the extremity of the rib or common footstalk. I do not know the fruit or flower of either. the 1st resembles the plant common to many parts of the U' States called the mountain holley.

    , entry from Wednesday, February 12, 1806, Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, University of Nebraska Press, accessed August 9, 2025
  • , Our State Flowers : The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths, The National Geographic Magazine 31, № 6 (): 500, 515. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/281561.
  • The Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, trans. Gilbert Murray, LL.D., D. Litt. (Oxford University Press, ): lines 910–913