Eating a Flower

I ate a glacier lily yesterday.  Honestly, I feel guilty about eating the lily because they are so beautiful.  The glacier lily tasted surprisingly delicious.

Glacier lilies have an extensive range in the Rocky Mountains.  They flourish in moist, rich alpine settings beginning in Alberta, Canada, and extending all the way down through Colorado.  Glacier lilies are among the first flowers to emerge in the spring.  I have seen them blooming at the edge of melting snowbanks.

Several thriving patches of glacier lilies appear each spring near my cabin.  Yesterday, while at my cabin burning some scrap lumber, I dug up and ate the corm (the equivalent of a bulb) from a glacier lily.  The corms are fragile and grow deep.  I had to work down through six inches of tangled grass, kinnikinnick roots, and pine tree roots to free the corm.

After I washed the corm and peeled away the outer layers—just as you do with an onion—I nipped a taste.  Starchy like a potato.  Crisp.  Verging on sweet.  That girl and my daughter also took a bite and liked the taste.

“I think it tastes like jicama,” my daughter remarked.

“Exactly so,” I said.

I consulted one of my flower books, Plants of the Rocky Mountains, upon returning home.  The book mentioned that many of the various Rocky Mountain tribes used the glacier lily as a food source.  The book also noted that eating too many of the corms can cause vomiting.  As most current books about flowers, Plants of the Rocky Mountains, suggests that gathering and eating glacier lilies is not a good practice because doing so can greatly reduce and endanger the populations in some areas.

Posted are two pictures of glacier lilies I snapped yesterday.

  --Mitchell Hegman