Galls and non-edible fruit on the Persea palustris

Persea borbonia, palustris, humilis, and americana, too

Having a famous relative can make one grow in the shadows, as three Perseas know too well.

There are four Perseas growing in Florida, three of them native, one an import. The  import is the most famous, Persea americana (PER-see-uh uh-mair-ah-KAY-nuh.) You know it as the avocado. The other three don’t produce an edible fruit so their drupes are left on the tree. But there is more to the native Perseas than meets the eye.

The unsung natives have leaves that can be used for seasoning, just like a bay leaf, and their leaves can be used to make a tea.  Better, no matter what your environment you’re in, one of those Three Leafleteers is near you.

P. humilis (HEW-mil-liss) likes it very dry and is found in scrubby areas. P. palustris (pah-LUS-tris) likes it feet very wet so it is a denizen of swamps. P. borbonia ( bor-BOE-nee-uh) likes it between. Fresh or dried leaves from all three can be used for tea and seasoning. But what of the avocado?

Spicebush Swallowtail favors Perseas

Leaves of the Persea Americana var. drymifolia (PER-see-ua  ah-mer-ree-KAY-nuh  drim-if-OH-lee-ah) have been used in the distant past for a tea and seasoning. Most of our present-day avocado leaves, Persia americana, are stronger because of breeding and are not usable. One way to tell if you have an ancient avocado tree (the Persea Americana var. drymifolia) is to crush the leaf and smell it. The crushed leaf of the older species should smell like anise or liquorish. The Aztex wrapped food in that leaf for flavoring and called that style of cooking tamale. Cooking with modern-day avocado leaves can make you ill… and don’t eat the avocado pit. It can make you sick or worse.  Also keep avocados away from your pets. There is good evidence that cats, dogs, cows, goats, rabbits, rats, birds, fish, and horses can be killed when they consume avocado leaves, bark, skin, or pit.

P. Borbonia is the best known native and is called the Red Bay. Why Red Bay? Bay is the English version of the Latin word Baca, which was the name of similar old world trees in the same family. The “red” comes from the wood of the Borbonia, which has a reddish luster and is prized in woodworking such as for interior finishing and boat interiors. The natives made spoons from it.  Oddly, one of the identifying characters of the Perseas are leaf galls, see picture above. Also, Persea borbonia on the east coast of Florida are dying out becaues of a disease.

Spicebush Swallowtail larva

Borbonia is a mixture of Greek and Latin, Bor — food —  and Bon — good,  food good, referring to the use of the leaves. Palustris means “of the swamp” and Persea palustris is called the swamp bay. Humilis means low growing. The P. humilis is also known as the “silk bay.”  Americana is from the Americas. Drymifolia, from the Greek, is a bit of a mystery. It can mean forest leaf or sharp/stinging/biting leaf.

The Perseas are favored by the Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly. Apparently its concoction of chemicals doesn’t bother it. Oh, and one last thing: It appears that Persea tea provides some protection against giardia.

Lastly the Persea borbonia and the Persea palustris can be difficult to tell apart though they like slightly different environments, the former neither very wet or very dry, the latter can tolerate very wet. But another key is to look at a leaf petiole, main stem on the underside and the underside of the leaf. According to botanist R. P. Wunderling With the P. borbonia little hairs on the petiol lay down, on the P. palustris they stand up. What I have found locally is that P. borbonia has very little hair at all, and what few it has is generally flat. P. palustris is hairy, not only the petiole and the back leaf spine but the back of the leaf as well. To see the hair, or absence of hair, one needs about a 30x magnification.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: P. Borbonia, the most common, has lance shaped 4-inch long leaves that are shiny bright green on top and light green on bottom. P. Palustris has leaves that are pale gray on the bottom with hairy red fringes, twigs are hairy. Crushing a leaf produces a very distinct bay leaf odor, the Palustis is not as strong as the Borbonia in aroma.  Borbonia can reach 70 feet high and three feet through. Palustris 30 to 40 feet. Fruit of both is a small bright blue to shiny black drupe — NOT EDIBLE. Twigs are slender and the bark reddish-brown and scaly. P. Humilis reaches 10 feet tall.  Its leaves are bronze on the underside. The leaves of all the Perseas are often covered with galls. That said it seems to me the P. borbornia seems the most affected by galls.

TIME OF YEAR: Fresh or dried leaves year round

ENVIRONMENT: P. Borbonia, like P. Palustris is found from Virginia south to Florida and west to Texas. P. Humilis is fond only in Central Floirda. Plustris is found in wet areas, Borbonia in neither wet or dry places. Humilis is found in sandy, dry scrub areas.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Fresh or dried leaves used as a bay leaf or as tea. The fruits of the palustris, borbonia and humilis are NOT edible. Avocado leaves (variation drymifolia) can be used to wrap food if it smells like anise.

 HERB BLURB

The leaves have been used as an abortifacient, analgesic, emetic and febrifuge. They have been used to treat fevers, headaches, diarrhea, thirst, constipation, appetite loss and blocked urination.  An external decoction wash has been used for rheumatic joints and painful limbs.

Reindeer moss is not moss but a lichen

 Edible Cladonia: What’s not to Lichen?

Lichen can be harder to tell apart than twins in the dark. My guess my picture above is of Cladonia Evansii (kla-DOE-ne-ah ev-AN-see-eye) which is a southern version of a common lichen that came down the Appalachians. It takes a lichenologist to know for sure, but fortunately lichen are not like mushrooms. While 96% of the 10,000 species of mushrooms are not edible (including the one to four percent that will definitely kill you ) only two lichen out of some 20,000 are what we would call poisonous, Letharia vulpina (leth-AH-ree-a vul-PEEN-ah) and Vulpicida pinastri, (vul-pis-EYE-dah pin-AST-try or wol-peek-EE-dah pin-ass-tree)) or Wolf Lichen and Powdered Sunshine Lichen… and conveniently they are both yellow, Wolf Lichen a greenish yellow and the Sunshine Lichen a sulphur yellow. And though internally toxic from vulpinic acid they can be used on external wounds and sores.

Wolf Lichen, one of the few toxic lichen

Most lichen are likable, but not exactly consumer friendly. What the lichen all share is acid and as such require proper preparation if they are to be eaten because unprepared and uncooked they will painfully attack your digestive track. Unprepared lichen taste like aspirin. That should motivate you to prepare it correctly. Never eat unprepared and raw lichen unless your life truly depends upon it.  It probably will not kill you but you will wish it had.

One of the most widespread and commonly eaten lichen, by beast and brute alike, is a northern version of what you see above, Cladonia rangiferina, (ran-jiff-er-EYE-nah or ran-ghif-er-EE-nah)  also known as Cladina rangiferina — both Latin for many branching reindeer like.  That’s rather clever since reindeer eat a lot of it and its branching resembles deer antlers. C. rangiferina, however, stops its southward migration in the United States with the end of the Appalachian Trail. I can remember as a boy, living on the northern end of those mountains in Maine, not only playing with C. rangiferina but running through brittle beds of red-topped Cladonia cristatella . You could actually leave foot prints in the lichen like those left in snow… and unknowingly crushing centuries of growth at the same time.

Powdered Sunshine lichen, also toxic

The two common “reindeer mosses” found here in central Florida are the Cladonia evansii and Cladonia subtenuis, with the subtenuis — which means thinner — being less compact than Cladonia evansii. C. evansii — named after North Carolina botanist Alexander W. Evans — has no official common name but it is called Powder Puff Lichen. C. subtenuis is called Dixie Reindeer Moss.

There are three surprising things about lichen. The first is lichen is a symbiotic relationship of two life forms, fungi and algae, with the fungus providing the form and the algae the operating system inside. That seems a lot more understandable than the creature normally used to explain symbiotic relationships, the Portuguese Man of War. It’s called a jellyfish but is really a colony of different life forms, one group whose job is defense and they sting painfully. Lichen are more likable. Heck even 50 or so species of bird use lichen for their nests. If ya can’t eat it, sleep in it.  By the way, it burns readily and makes great kindling, or a small hot fire.

The second surprise is folks used to make a lot of booze from lichen. For about 50 years in the 1800’s Sweden led the world in lichen alcohol production with the rest of Europe and Russia joining in. It was viewed as an alternative to grain alcohol. Lichen brandy was a big hit, and it was also used in the making of Akvavit, a traditional caraway-flavored spirit.  That said, I have to run off on a non-plant tangent here for a moment.

Akvavit comes from the Latin phrase Aqua Vite, which means “water of life.”  The Irish word “whisky” is from the same Latin phrase and means the same thing: “water of life.”  Akvavit/whisky…aqua vite….The obvious conclusion is the Irish spoke ancient Latin with more of an accent than the Scandinavians. Now, from a marketing point of view, you read it here first: They should reintroduce lichen into their Akvavit. Lichen is grown commercially in Scandinavia. It would make for great branding. Can’t you just see a clear vodka-like bottle with a lichen-esque label, maybe some stately lichen on some craggy gray rocks, maybe even a flak or two of lichen in the bottle…. it has to cost less than gold flakes….

Anyway…. Not only were lichen used to make alcohol but Russia managed to make a molasses out of it. I’m surprised the Russians didn’t try to make rum.  That alcohol and molasses could be made from lichen highlights their third interesting aspect: Most lichen, including most of those you see on trees, rocks and old cemetery stones, are some 94%  carbohydrates. That’s some 14%  more carbs than a potato.  But, along with those carbs is a lot of rock-dissolving acid that can burn your insides, which is why they have to be prepared a certain way.

The amount of acid varies from species to species with the Cladonias, especially C. rangiferina, being among the most nutritious and the least acidic. A combination of nutritional studies suggest Cladonias are, by dry weight,  1.4% ash, 5.4% protein, 32.9% fiber, 2.1% fat, and 0.501% niacin  3.7% calcium, and 0.09% phosphorus. They also have vitamin A.  Fiber, carbs, vitamins and protein. Maybe the Scandinavians of old were on to something.

In a severe survival situation lichen can be eaten unprepared and uncooked. You will survive but you will also have a severe stomach ache that will make you want to die. The amount of carbs per lichen species and its availability varies. To make the lichen edible they are soaked in several changes of water, better, several changes of water with bicarbonate of soda added to each soaking. Another method is to soak them with hardwood ashes.  The modern version of that is to soak them in a 1% solution of potash. A method used in China is to boil lichen for 30 minutes and then soak for two days in several changes of water. After discarding the soaking water they are boiled and that water discarded, or they are steamed. They are then ready to eat, plain or mixed with other things, or dried and added to flour or as a thickener to soups. Lichen is often cooked until it turns into a gelatinous mass. My mother remembers her mother using prepared lichen to make a pudding, probably as a thickener.  Cladonia islandica was used to thicken jelly until gelatins came along.  The point is the longer you soak them and the longer you boil them and the more often you change the water the more palatable they will be and the less acidic.

Yet another way is to take about three cups of lichen, cover with water, add about a quarter cup of bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate aka baking soda) put on a stove and bring to a boil and boil for about 15 minutes. Drain, replace the water, replace the bicarbonate of soda, again bring to a boil and boil for about 15 minutes. Drain, rinse, barely cover the lichen with water and bring to a simmer can cook until it is gelatinous. It is then edible but not greatly palatable.

Oh….You can also eat any lichen you find in the first stomach of a reindeer, but it’s messy and not too good tasting. To get around that you freeze the stomach and its content. Then you slice it off and put it in stews and the like. There it is far better, but not five stars.

I saw forager Dick Deuerling nibble on Cladonia evansii uncooked while out on the trail, just picked it up, crushed some in his hand and down it went. One also told me he just crumpled it up and dropped it into soup.  Woodsmen in northern Canada reportedly used rock lichen to make a “stimulating” tea by boiling it for 15 minutes. I suppose a stomach ache can be stimulating.

One point to consider is whether to eat lichen at all in populated areas. Lichens grow very slowly, one or two centimeters a year, and can live to be three thousand years old, and can stay in tact another 10,000 years. The lichen you may be thinking of partaking could be older than you are or was alive when the ancient Greeks were. Lichen can also collect a lot of pollution in those years. It just might be that it is good to know one can eat lichen but one doesn’t have to. In fact, they take very well to dish gardens and don’t have to be watered. They get all the moisture they need out of the air. It’s a pet that can outlive your parrot, and it talks less, too.

There are actually five different kinds of lichen: Those that grow in clumps as the one shown here, those that grow in flakes commonly seen on trees, crust lichen, often seen on cemetery stones, lichen that looks like a combination of flakes and crust, and a class called Leprous for powdery patches (so named by the ancient Greek Dioscorides because they resemble the lesions of leprosy.) Here are some more lichen that are commonly eaten.

Gyrophora,  aka Rock Tripe; Umbiliceria, also aka Rock Tripe, mucilaginous, used for thicken, has antibiotic properties; Historical Note: George Washington’s troops had to eat rock tripe during the deadly winter of 1777 at Valley Forge. Lecanora, aka Cup Moss, Manna, can be broken apart by the wind. This is the lichen mentioned in the Bible when it showered starving Israelis with “manna rain”; Alectoria, aka Black Tree Lichen, Indians steamed it for two days in pits, was eaten or dried and powdered for mush or thickener. Also eaten are Evernia, Sticta, Umbilicaria esculenta, Peltigera canina, and Aspicilia esculenta.

Usnea is antispetic

Usnea is also edible but is more valuable as an antibiotic and antiseptic (see separate entry.)  In fact, it it estimated that 50% of all lichen have medical applications but Usnea are especially good externally on wounds and the like. Usnea lichens have an elastic white chord running through the center of the main stem. Lichen that resemble Usnea do not have this white cord. They also appear grey-green throughout. Also Usnea lichens do not change color during the growing season whereas lichen which closely resemble Usnea do. If you’re in the southern US and you think you’ve found Usnea and it has a black hair through the middle you’ve found Spanish Moss. Spanish Moss is not edible but does have some medicinal applications.

There are two versions of how the word lichen came to be, both of them from the same Greek root.  λειχω (LEAK-ho) means to lick and  λειχην (leak-NEE) is an eruption. In modern Greek λειχην is what herpes is called. Theophrastus (371-284 B.C.), a Greek botanist, used the term to describe superficial growth on the bark of Olive trees, as if it had been licked up. The second version is that  flaky lichen looks like it is licking rocks and trees and were named lichen by botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in 1700. He was on a two-year trip to Greece, which at the time was enslaved by Turks, a slavery that for Greeks overall lasted over 400 years. To demonstrate how the Greek linguistic ear works, LEAK-ho is to lick and GLEE-ko is sugar, or a sweet lick.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, 1656-1708

As for exactly how many toxic lichen there are, well, two for certain, and maybe a 100 more. No one really knows. But, if the lichen you are looking at has any yellow parts, or is yellow, it is best not to eat it. That easy to remember.

Lastly if you are not inclined to eat lichen, especially those found on cemetery stones you can use the lichen to calculate how long the stone has been in the cemetery, a useful genealogical tool if the date is worn off, as is often the case with marble. To calculate, measure the lichen in centimeters from a center point to the outside edge, then multiply by five and subtract the total in years from today to get the latest date that the gravestone could have been made. The size of the lichen directly reflects how long the stone has been exposed and is a common dating technique of natural events.

For the curious, here are two recipes using C. islandica (called Icelandic Moss.) Below the “profile” is an except from the Journal of Economic Botany on how they made mollasses out of lichen.

Icelandic Lichen Flatbread

1 packed cup Icelandic moss (C. islandica after soaking)

1 1/2 c rye flour

1/2 c stoneground whole wheat flour

a pinch of salt

Boiling water as needed

One cup soaked Iceland moss is about two cups dried.

The Icelandic moss is soaked for a few minutes in lukewarm

water to soften it, then drained and chopped. Mix it with rye

flour, wheat flour and salt, then gradually add boiling water

and stir well, until you have a stiff but pliable dough. Divide

it into 12 equal pieces, roll them out thinly and cut out a

round cake, 7-8 inches in diameter. Prick them with a fork.

Cook on a griddle or bake at high heat until black spots

appear, then turn over and cook the other side. Store in a

damp cloth or plastic bag because they dry out quickly.

Lichen Milk Soup                                                                                                      

a large fistful of prepared Icelandic moss (C. islandica after soaking)

1 litre (4 cups) milk

1 tbsp sugar or brown sugar

salt

Prepared the lichen then dry it. Pour the milk into a saucepan and heat to the boiling point. Add the Iceland moss and the sugar and simmer for 10 minutes. Add salt to taste and serve. In another version, the soup is simmered for 2 hours, until somewhat gluey. Some versions add far more sugar but that is not traditional.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Cladonias: Spongy, grayish mass up to 4 inches thick forming extensive mats three or four inches  high, or clumps. Richly branched, each branch dividing into four, with the main branches distinctly curved in the same direction. Looks like the tubes inside a lung

TIME OF YEAR: Year round

ENVIRONMENT: Well drained open areas, sandy scrubland in Florida,  prefers acid soil, Alpine environments in the north. It grows where other plants will not and for virtually thousands of years so it can often be quite polluted including nuclear fall out. Choose carefully.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Must be soaked/boiled in copious amounts of water, or water with wood ashes or water with sodium bicarbonate  or potash to get rid of acids. Then it can be added to various foods, wet or dry  but must be cooked well.

From the Journal of Economic Botany Vol. 10 #4 pp 367-392, 1956 by George Llano.

Soft growing tips are edible

Salsola kali: Noxious Weed, Nibble & Green

When you first encounter a Russian Thistle it is the very last plant you would consider edible. Wiry, tough, sharp, pin prickly, irritating.  In fact, it kind of reminds you of a green sand spur on steroids.

However, the young shoots and tips of the growing plant are edible raw and actually quite palatable and pickable. Cooked like greens they’re even better. As the plant ages, though, it grows tough and formidable. Also called Tumbleweed and Windwitch, dried ones tumbling across the HD screen are now classic visual cues of desolation in Western-type movies.

Growing in beach sand at Daytona Beach, Fla.

The most reliable to eat is the Salsola kali  (SAL-so-la KAH-lee) which is believed to have arrived in the United States in the early 1870s in southern South Dakota. Some Russian immigrants moved to the town of Scotland in Bon Homme County. They had some Salsola seed in with their flax seed. By 1873 local botanists identified the new weed in town. By 1895 it had reached from the remote north middle of the country to New Jersey and California. That’s remarkable distribution in 30 years considering the plant had only summers to move.

Professor Lyster Hoxie Dewey, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture, said in two reports in 1893 and 1894 he knew how the plant was spreading: The trains. That may seem obvious to us now but back then it was hard work and good insight.  In Illinois he documented Salsola along railroad tracks and gave specific locations. The plant was not yet an “obnoxious weed” but Dewey saw the potential problem. He recommend railroad get rid of the plant wherever they found it and he theorized that by using the railroad and the wind the plant could be come a severe problem. Right man, right place, right observation, right idea, and completely ignored.

In fact, let’s give Dewey his due. People who got it right should be given some recognition. Lyster Hoxie Dewey (1865–1944) was an American botanist born in Cambridge, Michigan. In 1888 he graduated from Michigan Agricultural College where he went on to teach botany for two years. He was an assistant botanist for the United States Department of Agriculture from 1890 to 1902 and then botanist in charge of fibre investigations. By 1911 he was the U.S. representative to the International Fibre Congress in Surabaya, Java. Nice work if you can get it. His publications were mostly bulletins for the USDA on the production of fibre from flax, hemp, sisal, manila plants,  on the classification and origin of the varieties of cotton, and what brought him to our attention, investigations on grasses and troublesome weeds.

Some 117 years after Dewey’s Salsola report the current and perpetually out-of-date USDA distribution map shows Salsola to be in coastal areas only. However, it has been reported throughout the United States and Canada, particularly in dry and or salty areas including along northern (salted) roads, along fences/gullies in the plains states, and southwest deserts. Millions are spent each to get rid of it especially along highway right-of-ways. It can rapidly take over open land via up to 200,000 seeds per plant, the wind, and …yeph… the trains.

If your Tumbleweed is a Salsola but not the kali, you will need to verify its edibility with a local expert.  Elias and Dykeman (2008) say related species in the desert southwest of the United States are edible. This is where botanists let foragers down. They can’t quite decide if there is one species of Salsola ( the kali ) and a lot of varieties of that one species, or, if there are several species of Salsola. (Note: Edibility is usually not on the botanical radar either.)  If that’s not bad enough then one botanist thinks he can improve upon the name so we get different names for the same plant, or plants, or variety, or varieties. That turns it all into a linguistic morass meaning it’s tough to figure out if the plant you are looking is the plant they are talking about. Again, all the more reason to check with a local expert. You don’t need to know the name but you do need to know if it is edible….  Let me put it this way…. whatever the name is the one that grows on the sandy beach due east of me IS edible. Which species is it? Probably Salsola kali var. pontica. Three other Salsola that are known to be edible are S. australis, S. komarovi and S. soda.

Globally, Salsola kali et al is found in Afghanistan, Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, Greece, Hawaii, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, Western Siberia and Russia, where it is native to the southlands. In fact, more than a century ago Russia had to give up several development projects because the Salsola kali just plain got in the way.

Salsola is from the Latin salsa, and means “salted.” Kali (KAH-lee) has many meanings but the one that makes sense to me is Black because the plant was in high demand for soda ash and for that the plant had to be burned. The word also means “good” in Greek. In Hindu mythology, the goddess of destruction and creation is Kali. The English the word “alkali”  comes from the Arabic “al qaly” or “from Kali.” Oh, and here is brilliant botanical naming: Pontica (PON-ti-kah) means from Asia Minor, north of the Black Sea, where the plant is native. Talk about redundant….

Young plants make good fodder and grows well in low-water areas. In fact, when dry Salsola is a good source of fuel. It also has been used to make soap since Biblical times. Salsola soap can still be purchased around the Mediterranean.

Now some warnings: The plant, a relative of the Chenopodium, can contain as much as 5% oxalic acid thus folks who are sensitive to oxalic acid should avoid the genus.  It is also a severe allergen for some people. And if you eat it when it is too old the shape of the leaves — fat and pointed — will irritate your throat. Lastly, Salsola kali is a host plant of the Sugar Beet Leafhopper. This insect carries curly-top virus, a disease affecting sugar beets, tomatoes, and beans. This puts it on the farmers’ hit list.

Steamed Russian Thistle

Take two cups of shoots or tips (hint, they easily break off when bent.) Rinse and steam as is or cut them up and steam. Season with butter

Russian Thistle Broth

Five cups chicken broth

Two cups Russian Thistle tips or shoots

One potato or Jerusalem artichokes

One onion

Half cup parsley chopped

Half cup watercress chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

One bay leaf

Simmer the potato or Jerusalem artichoke in the broth. Add chopped onion and garlic. Cut Russian Thistle into one inch pieces (this is to assure you have edible pieces and makes it easier to eat.) Chop parsley and watercress, add with the whole bay leaf. Simmer 20 minutes or until the potato et al is done.

Tumbled Rice and Russian Thistle

Four cups Russian Thistle

One cup rice

One cup mustard or radish leaves or any mild green

One teaspoon pepper

One teaspoon garlic powder

A third of a cup of jack or similar cheese shredded.

Cook rice. Steam Russian Thistle tips or shoots. After a few minutes add the rest of the greens to the thistle tips. When greens are cooked, mix with the rice, season, sprinkle with the cheese.  Serve hot.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: Herb to five feet usually less than three, bushy, branching from base; upright or almost prostrate .Leaves and bracts fleshy, flatish, short,  tipped with sharp spines.  Flowers with 5 narrow whitish petals, solitary, unstalked. Older branches serpentine, purplish

TIME OF YEAR: Early summer locally, varies with local, can be late summer to fall in other areas, some nearly year round.

ENVIRONMENT: Sandy areas, seashores, some desert environments, salty areas, beside northern roads because of salt, or western roads because of open space, railroad tracks.

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Young shoots raw or cooked, tips of growing plants raw or cooked. Its seeds are reportedly edible but I don’t personally know that.

Sideroxylon: Chewy Ironwood

The Saffron Plum is not yellow or a plum, that is, it is not in the genus Prunus. And it is called a Buckthorn but it isn’t one of those either. And I learned it as a Bumelia, but sometime between 1996 and 1998 it became a Sideroxylon…Ya just got to love botanists and their penchants for changing plant names.

Note the thorns on the Saffron Plum, Sideroxylon celastrina

In all fairness, Bumelia is not accurate for the species. It means “European Ash” and most of the trees in the genus do not really look like the ashes at all. Sideroxylon is better but not without issue. That means, in mispronounced Greek, Iron Wood. That is a common term for the Carpinus genus.  But Sideroxylon it is. (In Greek the word for railroad, σιδηρόδρομος, sidirodromos, means iron road.)

This species is another fruiting tree that sits on the cusp of edible, some Sideroxylon species have just edible berries and some species have just unedible berries. Nine are commonly mentioned as edible, or chewable at least: S. celastrina, S. foetidissimum, S.  laetevirens, S. lanuginosa, S. lyciodes,  S. reclinatum S. salicifolium, and  S. tenax. The S. tenax is rather rare in the wild but a native landscape plant. One used to live not 2.5 miles west from me where the land abutted an overpass over Interstate 4. A road crew dutifully took it down and the road since widened. However, I recently spotted one inside a locked cemetery about a mile east of me. 

The fruit and leaves of a Sideroyxlon but which one? Photo by Green Deane

The ninth Sideroxylon received a lot attention in the 1970s and has occasioal revivials, the Sideroxylon dulcificum. (now called in 2020 Synsepalum dulcificum.) You may not recognize the name but if you eat the berries — the Miracle Berry — for about a half an hour afterwards you cannot taste anything sour. You can eat a lemon after the berries and the lemon will taste sweet. It also counters a metallic taste some experience while undergoing chemotherapy.  The ability of the berries to alter taste perception was noted as early as 1725. It was touted as a possible “sweetener” in the 70’s and the role of the sugar industry — if any — in its demise is controversial. Tablets of the berries can be bought over the Internet. How they work is not known but one theory is that it temporarily alters the physical shape of the taste receptors on the tongue.

Sideroxylons have several traits in common, which means you can at least identify the genus. The species is the next challenge. They all produce a milky sap, all have simple leaves without lobes or teeth, and the leaves alternate along the stem. The leaves are usually small, dark green, and rounded to elliptical. The Sideroxylons are nearly evergreen, dropping leaves late and putting on a new crop almost immediately. Like Hawthorns they branch irregularly giving each plant “character.” Sideroxylons develop short unhooked thorns that are not aggressive. Their  flowers are small and white sometimes greenish white, some are attractive and some are aromatic. The fruit is dark purple, egg-shaped, oblong to round, juicy. The tree usually fruits heavily.  (By the way they are all anti-inflammatory as well.)

Ripe Saffron Plum, Sideroxylon celastrina

The fruits of the S. foetidissimum and S. salicifolium are gummy and acidic — think eating it as gum rather than a fruit. They can stick your lips together. If you eat too many it can burn the lips of sensitive individuals. Sap from the S. Salicifolium has been used as gum. The Sideroxylon celastrina (sid-er-ROX-il-on see-LASS-trin-a) is the one most recommended because it has the largest and best fruit. It is a coastal hammock tree and is found mid-Florida south and in south Texas. It is also called in many publications and websites Bumelia celastrinum (Bew-MEE-lee-uh see-LASS-trin-a.) Celastrina is also mispronounced Greek meaning resembling the Celastrus, or the Bittersweet.

Green Deane’s “Itemized” Plant Profile

IDENTIFICATION: A coastal shrub or tree but found inland, thorny branches, leaves narrow oblong, or spatulate, one to one and a half inches long, smooth, sometimes spine tipped, often densely clustered along branches. The flower is tiny, white, five lobes, in axillary clusters (where stem and leaf meet) fragrant. Fruit oblong or cylindrical, 3/4 inch long, dark purple or black.

Miracle Fruit, Sideroxylon dulcificum

TIME OF YEAR: Almost year round

ENVIRONMENT: Hammocks

METHOD OF PREPARATION: Ripe fruit eaten raw, but not the seed.

Sideroxylon dulcificum