#wildflowerhour

Nine feet up in the tallgrass, leaves turned north and south to duck the midday sun. That's how it got the name, and it's how lost people once took a bearing on open ground.

Silphium laciniatum. Blooming right now through September. Children of several Plains nations chewed the hardened resin off the upper stalks as a mouth-cleaning gum; Pawnee practice used the pounded root as a tea. Nineteenth-century doctors made claims I won't repeat as advice — so let me be plain: this is a plant to plant, not a plant to dose.

Everything you can see of it is built to be burned off. The taproot runs fifteen feet down into ground that hasn't been broken since before there was a state there. Some of them live close to a century.

Prairie is among the most destroyed habitats on this continent. Putting one in the ground is a fifteen-foot root laid into soil that will outlive you.

Cha bhris am freumh — the root does not break.

https://thistleandmoss.com/p/what-survives-the-morning-skynet-is-coming-we-are-all-dead#the-nurturing-food-as-medicine?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

#BloomScrolling #GardensOfMastodon #wildflowerhour #NativePlants #Prairie #Gardening #Herbalism #Druid #Folklore #Nature #Botany #Photography #DailyGathering