It is no particular trick to identify a plant as being a wild buckwheat, even in the winter. Mostly, you’ll see it from above, so looking down, you see cute little buttons that look sort of like dried flowers. The buttons come in clusters of their own. You find them on dry hillsides or the tops of hills and mountains. And you’ll probably be happy about that.
In the pre-snow winter, the leaves are strikingly red and green, quite beautiful on an otherwise taupe hillside.
Without too much effort, if you lie down on the ground or pick a stem and hold it up, you’ll see that all these flower clusters are actually at the tops of short pedicels as part of an umbel, and where they all join, there is probably a whorl of green, leaf-like bracts.
So all this is easy and can be done in a minute. But that’s where it ends.
Start with color. The blossoms may be white, cream or red (all -ish). But… individual clusters may turn from white to pink and red as they age. So, looking at a flower cluster doesn’t really tell you what color to match it with.
And those bracts (the involucre). If you hold the blossoms upside down, you might (or might not) find another set below each individual cluster.
So what’s the problem? Earle and Lundin illustrate only 9 species, and they look different enough. Dee Stickler shows 3 species, all very different, in his Alpine book and 2 in his Prairie book.
The problem is, first, that Eriogonum is by far the largest genus in the family Polygonaceae. It includes some 230 species, mostly of western North American plants. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game lists 50 species present in Idaho. And second, let’s consider just one of those, sulphurflower wild buckwheat, Eriogonum umbellatum. As Earle and Lundin note in their book, this species is highly variable, with 40 or so recognized varieties, several of them, at least, common in Idaho. Or third, the fact that the species hybridize with each other, and otherwise have huge variations in form and color. Or fourth, that the genus is still undergoing speciation, i.e. many of the species themselves are not “stable”.
As the Southwest Colorado Erigonium page says: “Various Eriogonum species may be tall and lanky; matted; sprawling; bushy; herbaceous or woody; pink, white, or yellow flowering; annual, biennial, perennial, or monocarpic; and often in hot and dry environments.” That pretty much covers it. Well, and that they may have simple or compound umbels, absent or invisible involucres below the flower clusters, and … whatever.
Finally, even the descriptions of individual species published by different groups are so different it is hard to believe they are looking at the same plants… and their accompanying photos verify that. Earle and Lundin, for example, describe Erigonium pyrolifolium as having “smooth, bright green basal leaves and white flowerheads.” The Wikipedia entry says it has woolly leaves and small hairy flowers ranging from greenish-white or white to pink. At Crater Lake, it is small and shrubby. pnflowers.com says the leaves can be hairy or smooth. The Jepson herbarium says they are smooth. The Montana field guide says they are “white- to brown-tomentose [hairy] below, nearly glabrous [smooth] above”. You get the message.
So the answer in this case is not 42, but that identification is really hard because there is just so much variability. Without a hand lens and a botanical key, and probably years of experience, real identification to species may be impossible. And it is certainly not going to happen (for most of us) in a minute. I’m happy to call it buckwheat.
ps: In case you wondered, wild buckwheats and culinary buckwheats are different. The culinary version is Fagopyrum esculentum, but is at least in the same family as the eriogonums.
