The above link is to a plant conservation organization that has put together a detailed and entirely free introductory course. I’m going through it and while it is relevant to my professional work it’s also relevant to my beloved plant breeding hobby. The genetics sections bring up some extremely relevant points to plant breeding. One very interesting one is this- for a plant population to become locally adapted it must be genetically diverse. True for rare plants and true for crops. Our local movement of evolutionary plant breeding that we are calling adaptation gardening is developed under the idea of bringing together divergent crop varieties and crossing them to create more diverse populations and then reselecting those populations for traits that matter to us- including local adaptation. In the process I think we are also engaging in a citizen science initiative to conserve crop diversity. Also, it doesn’t hurt to learn more about the conservation of the wayside plants that support the pollinators that pollinate our crops so effectively. Though I profoundly believe that plant species and crop diversity have intrinsic value. Inherent value not dependent on their services.
Very neat! You’re right, there’s definitely a huge overlap between adaption plant breeding and conservation of native species.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if most people who are really interested in both also enjoy foraging. 
I tried to click on the class as well as other links. A lot of them were giving me error issues. I did find some of their videos. I watched this was, which were great, Reducing Mate Limitation in the Forked Aster (Eurybia furcata): A Case Study of Genetic Augmentation .
I tried to register over the weekend, and the site was also giving me problems. But I successfully registered today.
Yes to this!
Right now I am packing some seed mixes that will get shipped across Canada. Some of the recipients will save seeds. We are definitely conserving genetics by doing this.
I’ve collected up and propagated a lot of wild plants from my area but there is one that is so rare that I have always been afraid to try translating or even collecting its seeds. All I’ve even done is clear weeds and other plants away from it in hopes it seeds would have a better chance and that seems to have worked as there is now a small patch of maybe a dozen of them when there were only two when I first found it. I have no idea what it is. The leaves are thin with a bluish color, and all grow up from the ground instead of on stems, kind of like a daffodil. It grows a flower stalk up to around two feet tall with small pale blue flowers that open from the bottom up and do not last very long. Actually, I think it dies back and goes dormant by mid-summer. Now that that one has produced some offspring, I may try to transplant one, problem is I won’t be able to find it until it blooms, and the blooms are so short lived it will be pure luck even then.
Two other rare plants, ipomoea pandurata and phaseolus polystachios are not all that rare at all, at least in my neighborhood.
I wonder if your mystery plant could possibly be prairie camas Mark? Camassia angusta Southern Wild Hyacinth | Prairie Moon Nursery
Yes! that looks like it. Maybe it isn’t so rare, and it is OK to go dig some up to bring home. It is about the only plant that grows along roadsides that I haven’t already brought home over the years.
In the valley below my house there is a steep wooded hillside that faces almost due north. The trees are large and the soil is covered in decades of rotted leaves and stays moist most of the time, direct sun never hits the ground there. There are several little fern-like plants and lots of small spring wildflowers of various kinds. It’s the kind of place where ginseng will grow but places like it are hard to find and don’t always have the same variety of little plants. I’ve never dug in the ground there, but I have brought home some seeds. None of the seeds have ever grown for me though, even if they did manage to sprout.
On the Camassia angusta. Do you know any more about it? Like how deep the bulbs might be and time of year that would be best to transplant it? Even if it isn’t quite as rare as I thought overall, it is here and I don’t want to risk killing it. It does go dormant in summer so I’m guessing late summer, early fall might be best.
Mark I googled it and it appears you may have found a genuine rare plant for Indiana.
Its listed as S1 in your state. The highest level of rarity at the state level. It is G5 though globally- So I would recommend sourcing it from a nursery like Prairie moon. Avoid collecting it from the wild.
There are about six species of Camas and the two eastern species are sold by Prairie moon. Five of the species are available to purchase. The three western ones are grown overseas in the Netherlands as bulbs just as tulips are and are thus less expensive than the ones from the native plant nurseries. In general they had great cultural importance as a food source for indigenous peoples. Luther Burbank considered his lost breeding project with them to be a very promising new crop. The sixth species is I think a narrow serpentine endemic known from only a few locations on the west coast, super rare, not in cultivation, and thus isn’t available.
I purchased all five available species about five or six years ago. The eastern species died out on me. Only one of the three western species made it in my backyard but those bloom every year.
Have any of them made bulbs big enough to eat? I’m greatly interested in prairie camas as an ornamental edible, and I have seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery that I haven’t sown yet. What should I expect?
I am hoping for it to be promising as a root crop, but I’m concerned that it may be one of those edible perennial roots that takes many years to grow to maturity and/or never gets very large.
I reckon its a matter of finding the right camas for your climate and that may not be easily done even when possible. The two Eastern species were not right for my Western garden. It’s not a quick crop from seed. Normally propagated from bulbs. The one species that did well I suspect is the one species known for its unpalatable nature. I suspect that protects it from my backyard pocket gophers.
The Prairie Moon website has two different species and I can’t tell for sure from the pictures if what I see is Camassia scilloides or Camassia angusta. The scilloides flowers look a little more numerous and more tightly spaced than the angusta. Going by that, I think what I see is the angusta. I’ll have to wait until it blooms and get some photos. I’m guessing these are the eastern species. They have scilloides seeds in stock but not angusta. I wonder if that means angusta is more difficult to grow.
The bulbs they show of angusta look pretty small. Add that to how rare it is and even if it is good to eat, it would be hard to grow enough to matter.
I’m going to try to at least collect seeds this year from the patch I’ve been tending. I would love to get it growing here at home because it is in bit of a precarious spot. On one side there is a gravel road that occasionally gets flooded and repaired and on the other side is a power line that gets cleared and maybe sometimes even sprayed. There is more and more traffic in that area and some day they may even pave that road. It is very close to the road so if that happens it might not survive. The fifty foot strip between the road and power line isn’t big enough to protect it.
I think there is a habitat difference between those two species too.
I was able to track down some of the stuff about Luther Burbank’s work, including your older posts on OSSI. Looks like most of it is with different species. Didn’t find anything about C angusta. Do you know if C angusta and C scilloides can hybridize?
They sure do look a lot alike; I wonder if they are really different species or just regional differences of the same one. Not that I really know a lot about such things. In any event I think I will order some of the C scilloides seeds just for fun.
They are time separated on their bloom window and habitat differentiated so are good species. Though some refrigerated pollen ot a forced bulb might let you cross the species barrier like Burbank did in his experiments so long ago. When I bought the bulbs of five species I think they all bloomed for me.