Claytonia lanceolata / lanceleaf spring beauty

Adjectives: clonal, disturbed, early spring, edible, forest openings, highly visible, native, snowmelt, striking

Also known as: western spring beauty, spring beauty, Indian potato

One of the more diagnostic things for suggesting “spring beauty” is that they are highly visible because they bloom so early in the season, barely waiting for the snow to melt. Then, the blossoms are so welcoming of the season. Each flower in a well-endowed terminal raceme has 5 petals which are usually white-ish with pink/purple stripes, although they may also be pink (or rarely, yellow or orange). If you look closely, they may also have a yellow blotch (how’s that for a technical term) at the base of each petal. Alas, the plant is a “spring ephemeral”, meaning that it blooms and is gone quickly.

This small plant usually has just two opposite leaves around midstem. They are either thin and pointy (lanceolate) or rounded.

Spring beauties are clonal, each growing from a corm that, although small, is edible and is supposed to taste like potato (cooked) or a radish (raw). The size of the plant is determined by the size of the corm and the fertility of the soil. In fact, the whole plant is supposedly edible and the leaves sweet… so they say.

The photos in the gallery came from two distinctly different places. On the one hand, there was a large patch of them on the Grove Creek trail in early June, 2019. The second group were found in an abandoned, pre-housing-development vole pasture on the Valley floor in April, 2020. I don’t know how long a pasture has to be forgotten before the small spring ephemerals get in, but these were a delightful find.