Native Food Plant Profile: Yampah
By Brian Geier, Education Program Coordinator
Yampah
Perideridia spp
Yampah, whose delicate flowers blanket parts of Vesper Meadow in late summer, is a beloved native food plant of the Pacific Northwest. Regional names for Yampah include Cawíitx and Sawítk (native names from northwestern Oregon, from the Nimipuutímt and Sahaptin languages, respectively), Ipos, and Epos. It is also referred to as “False Caraway” due to its visual (and olfactory) resemblance to the common caraway plant/spice.
Perideridia, the botanical name for Yampah’s genus, translates to “around the neck” and refers to the structure of its flower. A member of the carrot family of plants, the Yampah flower is an “umbel”, so named because of a flower structure that resembles an upside-down umbrella, with multiple flower stalks emerging from a central stem and reaching in all directions. Flowers of this family are often fragrant, and include an impressive percentage of the spices used in kitchens, including caraway, cumin, dill, fennel, anise, celery, and parsley.
July 2019. From the Healthy Traditions project of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians:
The Story of a Plant that Waited over 150 years for its People to Return
“Yesterday, Yampa was lifted from the earth, passed from youth to elder, and between siblings and cousins. Siletz tribal members made a rare visit to their ancestral lands, some had a first taste of Yampah, a food of their family and of their place. This moment of reconnection goes far beyond words and pictures. A couple thousand years of cultivation and care by native people has enabled Yampah and other native plant crops at Vesper Meadow to endure four generations of cattle grazing. After 150 years, these people return to the land and (re)develop relationship with a place that provides physical and spiritual sustenance. In short form: ecological restoration is synonymous with cultural revival."
“Ecological restoration is synonymous with cultural revival.”
Edible portions of Yampah include the root and seed. (Note of caution: look-a-likes include poisonous and deadly plants.) Like many “root crops” or “Indian potatoes”, Yampah has underground storage organs that remain alive when conditions above-ground are too cold or dry. Ecologists refer to plants that employ this strategy as geophytes, and underground parts include bulbs, corms, taproots, tubers, and rhizomes.
Appropriate, traditional harvesting technologies of Yampah and other geophytes include tools and strategies that were used with full understanding of the reproductive capacity of these underground parts, with some being left behind or intentionally spread to ensure a healthy plant population into the future.
Other “root crop” genera include Allium (wild onions), Brodiaea, Camassia, and Lomatium, among others. On geophytes, Frank Lake writes, “Before the substantial ecological changes brought by European settlement, many of the geophytes (of California) had all the attributes of a staple food crop: they were abundant, widespread, storable, intensified, and nourishing.” You can read more about geophytes in this article by Frank Lake and M. Kat Anderson.
As a program of The Understory Initiative, Vesper Meadow works toward restoration and conservation of native plant communities, including seed collection of culturally significant plants like Yampah.
A site below Upper Table Rock, slated for the development of a power substation, where The Understory Initiative collects and saves seeds of Yampah and other culturally significant plants.
Through public events like the “Walk, Weed, and Seed” series, the Vesper Meadow Education Program engages volunteers in the collection of seeds of native plants. Feedback from participants of these programs in 2020 was consistently positive and hinted that wild seed collection can be a profound experience. Participants spoke of feeling an “almost ancient” familiarity to the sounds of footsteps in dry grasses and of seeds falling into collection containers, the smells of fragrant flowers, the constant spanning of the ground while the eyes look for pattern recognition of the target species, the act of taking only a certain percentage of seed while leaving others, skipping over plants where spiders or pollinators were busy, the experience of working as a group to collect from the wild, and to feeling purpose in the act of saving seed for restoration efforts.
Watch this short video to see a demonstration of how to determine when seed is ready for collection: