Eating Your Landscape
Important Links
 
The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook by Darcy Williamson is full of recipes for twenty-eight wild plants. The ones we've tried so far are delicious.
Rosalind Creasey's The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping created the field of edible landscaping. It will change your attitude about landscaping forever. It doesn't contain many wild species but the ideas in it are priceless.
Both books are available at BarnesandNoble.com. (Clicking on one of the books will open a new window to their site where you can find out more about it.)
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When you look at the beautiful mountain scenery in the Rockies, you
might think of family picnics or hiking or winter skiing.
You might not realize that you're surrounded by delicious edible plants.
These edible plants can make an attractive addition to your garden, serving
you with both beauty and bounty. Here are some of our favorites.
Chokecherry Blossoms
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Chokecherries
Chokecherries grow as bushes and small trees. Their rhisomes creep under the ground and spring up in surprising places to grow new bushes. In doing so they bind together the soil on the mountainsides where they grow.
In early June they blossom with profuse white gobs of flowers that smell sweet and are beautiful to behold. By the end of July, the blossoms turn into strings of red berries that are so sour they make your mouth pucker. But you'll still have to fight the birds for them because they gobble them up greedily!
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Serviceberries
Serviceberries are tall bushes that grow to fifteen feet or more. In mid-June they produce small white blossoms that look somewhat like cherry blossoms. These turn into green berries that gradually change to red and then ripe blue-black. In some parts of the country they are sweet right off the bush. Where we live, they taste bland and they have lots of seeds in them. But when you cook them they with a tiny bit of sugar they have a wonderful almondy taste. The Amerindians ground them up with venison and corn to create pemmican which they used as trail food. Serviceberries have lots of Vitamin C.
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Serviceberries
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Elderberry Blossoms
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Elderberries
Elderberries make fine pies. They grow on a woody shrub that can be twelve feet tall or higher. The white blossoms grow in large clusters that turn into dark blue berries. You can eat the blossoms as well as the berries.
The Amerindians made wind flutes from the woody stems which have a soft pith in them. We tried it once and it didn't turn out very well. But someone who knew what he or she was doing could make a fine instrument, I'm sure.
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Gooseberry-Currants
As their name implies, gooseberry-currants seem to be a wild hybrid of gooseberries and currants. The leaves look like those of both plants and the fruit looks like a gooseberry except it's orange instead of purple when it's ripe. It has an unforgettably woodsy flavor. At our house, we call them "stickyberries" because the fruit sticks to your fingers when you pick it. You can eat these raw from the bush or make pies and jams from them. We never make anything out of them because we eat them too fast.
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Gooseberry-Currants
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