In honor of Earth Day, I went nature hunting in this gorgeous weather. Because I love you all so much, I’m going to share some of my findings. Which will mostly end up being spiders and dead things. :)

Native North American Edible Plants

Stinging Nettle, Urtica Dioica

The stinging nettle is covered in hundreds of nature’s hypodermic needles, but when blanched or steamed, these angry little hairs act like rigid pasta noodles after a good boil. They’re often eaten like steamed spinach (often with spinach, in fact) and the blanch water is drank as tea.

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Native North American Edible Plants

Pine, genus Pinus

Pine nuts are tasty and extremely high in protein. Pine needles are also high in protein, and some people steep them for a long time to make a bitter tea. It’s most likely so bitter because conifer tree leaves are extremely acidic compared to deciduous tree leaves. To counteract the bitterness of the tea, many people douse it in honey.

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Native North American Edible Plants

Blackberries and Raspberries, genus Rubus

Black- and raspberries are basically the same plant other than the fruit. The great benefit for them is that they’re incredibly hardy. In many parts of the US and the rest of the world, farmers buy specialized blackberry herbicide because the wild bushes pop up like weeds. They also have beautiful white, star-shaped flowers.

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Native North American Edible Plants

Elderberry, genus Sambucus

The elderberry is another globetrotter (not found exclusively in North America), but one of the neat things about them is that there are five varieties in the US alone. The black elderberry (Sambucus nigra), the one from Europe, was important medicinally for hundreds of years. It was also responsible for a delicious fermented cordial that, when mixed with other good stuffs, was the cough syrup of the world before industrialization. The alcoholic part of that was the joke in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”).
The elderberry tree was also the source wood for the elder want, is the wood of choice for some lesser known woodwind instruments, and has a root system that helps foster mycelial activity more than just about any other plant. It was often planted in the middle of the garden so that everything around it could benefit from the soil critters it fostered. Also, the flowers are said to make a lovely tea.
However, beware that only a few types of elderberries are edible raw. Otherwise, you have to cook or ferment them for them to be edible without making you sick.
Pictured is the black elderberry. 

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Native North American Edible Plants

Mulberries, genus Morus

Mulberries are not exclusively American as a genus, but the red mulberry (Morus rubra) is. It has a similar range to the paw paw tree, but never really spread to the Midwest or points further east. This wonderful little tree is neat in a few ways: it has one of the highest protein contents of any fruit, contains anthocyanins (which, in addition to making vivid food coloring, help regulate the digestive process), and it’s the tree that silk worms live in! Well, technically they live in the Asian white mulberry tree, but we can give some credit by association. Mulberries look a lot like blackberries, but where blackberries are purplish, they are a dark wine red.
Pictured is the native red mulberry. 

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Native North American Edible Plants

Pondberry, Lindera melissifolia

Also called southern spicebush, the pondberry is a fruit bearing bush native to the area around Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas. It is named for its growth habit, which is clinal, like the paw paw, but usually spreads along the banks of slow moving water (like ponds). It tastes zesty and sweet at the same time, having been described to have the taste of a grape with a hint of cinnamon in it. It is very endangered and never became commercially significant because its fruiting is very much varied from year to year.

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Native North American Edible Plants

Pawpaw, Asimina triloba

Once one of the more common trees in North America, the pawpaw is a clinal tree with some of the largest edible fruit in the region. They sort of look like banana trees and have big tropical-looking leaves despite being native to as far north as Ontario and no further south than north Texas. They probably never appealed to mass producers because the fruits don’t keep well, fermenting just days after being picked.

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Neptune’s necklace (Hormosira banksii) is one of the many brown seaweeds endemic to New Zealand and the cooler waters around Australia. Its distinctive fronds, which look like a string of brown beads, are made up of chains of ovoid, hollow segments joined by thin constrictions in the stalk. Small reproductive structures are scattered over each “bead.”
Dense mats composed almost entirely of this one species can be found on seashore rocks. The fronds are attached to the rock by a thin, disk-shaped holdfast. Neptune’s necklace also lives unattached among mangrove roots. The shape of its segments varies according to habitat. They are spherical and about 2cm wide in fronds growing on sheltered rocks, in mussel beds on tidal flats, or in mangrove swamps. Fronds growing on subtidal rocks on moderately exposed coasts have smaller segments that are just 6mm long.

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Sea grapes (Caulerpa racemosa) have creeping stolons (stems) that anchor them to rocks or in sand, and from which arise upright shoots covered with round sacs, or vesicles, hence the common name sea grapes. Each plant is a single huge cell. Old plants may become densely branched and entangled, growing to two meters across. There are many varieties of sea grapes and around 60 species of Caulerpa worldwide.
A strain of Caulerpa taxifolia that is widely used in marine aquariums is an invasive species. It is toxic to grazers, grows rapidly, and forms a dense, smothering carpet on the seabed. In 1984 it was discovered in the Mediterranean off Monaco, and has since spread rapidly along the coast, altering native marine communities.
Because of their highly invasive nature, nine species of Caulerpa have been banned from being sold in California, including Caulerpa racemosa.

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