Blue camas (Camassia spp) is a tall elegant lily that blooms during the spring in the Pacific Northwest. Meriwether Lewis on June 12, 1806 noted that “The quawmash is now in blume and from the colour…as a short distance resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.” Vast camas meadows were common features of wet prairies in the Willamette Valley bottomlands prior to the arrival of Euro-American settlers. They were an exceptional, highly nutritious food crop for the Kalapuya people in the Valley who harvested and roasted the bulbs in earthen ovens, and stored them as dried cakes. Lewis and Clark noted that consuming the roasted camas cakes caused some stomach distress. David Douglas, the renowned Scottish naturalist and explorer, remarked that “they produce flatulence; when in the Indian hut but I was blown out by strength of wind.”
A beautiful blue ocean of camas in south Benton County.
Last Saturday, a collection of Greenbelt Land Trust friends, board members, trustees, and staff journeyed to south Benton County to walk the broad Willamette River floodplains of Harkens Lake. Greenbelt acquired conservation easements on nearly 400 acres of land at Harkens Lake and has been actively transforming the landscape into bottomland hardwood forest and prairie over the past three years. The group walked through an emerging forest of young black cottonwoods, Oregon ash, big-leaf maple, some Oregon white oak, a scattering of ponderosa (valley) pine, and a mix of understory shrubs such as snowberry, Oregon grape, vine maple and ocean spray. In 2013, the plants were 12-15 inch bare stems and are now robust 4-8-foot young saplings or flourishing shrubs providing nectar from flowers for insects and seeds for future generations. We stepped over a large western pond turtle that had ventured into the young forest likely to deposit eggs in a shallow earth cavity. Matt, Greenbelt’s Stewardship Manager for the Willamette River projects, described the restoration trajectory for the floodplain which included creating more avenues during high water events for the river to flow into the floodplain through swales and backchannels.
Board, Staff and Trustees pause at Harkens Lake
Our next stop for the tour was a prairie in eastern Linn County. Part of the property contained a wet ash/tufted hair grass community. In early April the open meadows of the ash forest were covered with the short, yellow, asymmetrical flowering umbels of Bradshaw’s lomatium or desert parsley. Bradshaw’s lomatium is an endangered plant endemic to the wet, open grasslands of the Willamette Valley. It has mostly disappeared from its historic range but was found in abundance on this remnant patch of wet prairie. During our Saturday tour, the lomatium were no longer blooming, but the prairie meadows were filled with an ocean of blue camas. We spotted another lily with white flowers interspersed in the canopy of blue. This plant was death camas (not a true camas), and apparently the bulbs are highly poisonous unlike blue camas. Perhaps someday once the young trees at Harkens Lake have become gallery forests of giant cottonwoods, they will be partnered by adjacent prairies overflowing with undulating waves of blue camas.
An up-close shot of blue camas reveals a diversity of hues.
