Death camas may be pretty to behold but it’s deadly to ingest.
Wondering where the Twisp Valley Life column has been? We took an extended vacation and upon our return, my son contracted COVID, so I’ve been homebound, far removed from local ongoings. I wanted to report on the Earth Day concert at the Doran Ranch hosted by Methow Recycles, or the Farmers Market, or the American Legion chili contest, or the many sporting events — but CDC protocol requires home isolation, and someone has to stay home with the infected child, so I’ve missed out on most things newsworthy and unnewsworthy.
We heard it was cold while we were away. It also looks as though it’s been dry. The combination of these factors leads to an overall assessment that the wildflowers are a bit behind this year. If you’ve read my column over the years, you will recall I like to feature wildflowers through the growing season as way to capture the season.
This week’s wildflower is the death camas (Toxicoscordion venenosum). The death camas is a lily-type flower that emerges from a bulb. It can appear in groups or solitary, on dry hillsides or moist meadows. A cluster of creamy white flowers that form a conical flower head sits atop a single stock that emerges from elongated leaves. I love this ominous, poisonous plant. All parts of the plant are toxic, particularly the bulb. Poisoning affects all systems of the body inducing vomiting, neurological convulsions, muscle weakness and collapse, low heart rate, and low blood pressure. It can result in death.
There’s a fine line between poison and medicine. Traditional medicines and herbal therapies, we all well know, depend entirely on what the earth produces. As modern, reductionist scientific methods emerged, they sought to distill our natural world into discreet definable units of inquiry, the molecular world was discovered, and we learned to manipulate and manufacture chemicals to suit our uses. But the search in nature for curatives continues, despite our technological advances.
Scientists in more recent years have been turning to snake and spider venom, squid ink and mushrooms to test all kinds of drug therapies. The compound responsible for the deadliness in death camas is an alkaloid called zygadenine. I was a mediocre student in organic chemistry, so I had to Google this one. Alkaloids are nitrogen-based molecules, produced naturally by many living organisms. Many alkaloids compose drugs like morphine and are poisons. According to the American Chemistry Society, a similar compound to zygadenine was recently screened for effectiveness to combat COVID-19 by Chinese scientists who concluded that there may be promising uses of these types of compounds in viral therapy.
Death camas will be sprouting and blooming for the next couple weeks and migrating to higher elevations as temperatures increase. Keep an eye out for it. Who knows, it might hold the cure to our next pandemic. If intrinsic beauty, awe, and intellectual enrichment aren’t enough, the utility of biodiversity matters, and it’s why on this Earth Day, learning a bit more about what grows nearby is time well spent.
