Wild Hyacinth Seeds (Triteleia hyacinthina)

Another splendidly long-lived western wildflower with an edible bulb. Also known as white brodiaea, and fool’s onion, this is a plant that can grow anywhere camas grows – preferring “wet winter/dry summer” locations from British Columbia to south into central California, and from western Nevada and Idaho to the Pacific Coast. Like camas, this plant takes a number of years to flower when planted from seed, and when it does mature to a flowering age, the tall handsome clusters of blooms last mere days, before disappearing back under-ground (sometimes not appearing again for several years). The slender, cryptic leaves of plant similarly make only brief appearances. All of this happens year-after-year, decade-after-decade, century-after-century in the very long lifespan of enigmatic plant. Over that timescale the plant slowly develops into a tennis ball-sized bulb (actually a corm), that may anchor itself more than a foot deep into heavy, mucky, clay soils. Although slow to start from seed