For years my wife and I have enjoyed the annual late-spring appearence of a tall plant with delicate flowers, whose botanical identity we couldn’t easily discover. My wife loves to call them the “Faerie Towers,” which always seemed to me a fitting and very satisfying name. Recently I discovered that this plant was well known to the local indigenous peoples as a very useful food, medicine and utility plant. We know it now as Wavyleaf Soap Plant, or Soaproot (Chlorogalum pomeridianum).
I discovered a wonderful refence for the plant on the USDA site, here (PDF). In this “Plant Guide” reference you’ll find some good description of its ethnographic and botanical properties. [citation: USDA, NRCS. 2009. The PLANTS Database (http://plants.usda.gov, 22 June 2009). National Plant Data Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70874-4490 USA. -- a good database, it seems, for botanical information]
I’d really like to know what the Native Peoples called this plant, and how they thought of it mythologically — there seems always to be a story around every plant with which people have some meaningful interaction.
In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I snapped over the weekend.
Chlorogalum pomeridianum
And here is the whole plant in a typical stand.
Soaproot Stand
