The famous market gardener Elliot Coleman recommends two crops Claytonia and Corn Salad for winter greens which he raises in unheated cold frames in Maine.
The former Claytonia is also known as Miner’s Lettuce. It was formerly known as Montia perfoliata which is now Claytonia perfoliata and split into three species additionally Claytonia parviflora and Claytonia rubra. In my area of Montana, the latter species has an additional subspecies Claytonia ssp. depressa which is disjunct here from most of the range of that subspecies. All three species are reported from Montana but mostly here we have Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra. In California it is sometimes possible to find all three species and hybrids thereof in proximity.
Claytonia in Flora of North America @ efloras.org
A former colleague of mine from a past job at the San Bernardino National Forest went on to study Claytonia and has a nice post about the three species complex of Miner’s Lettuce here:
Claytonia rubra, what is that? pt. II | Claytonia.org
Make sure to scroll to the bottom of Tommy’s article as he has a nice photo where he pulled all three species growing nearby and photographed them so that the differences are easily seen.
So, one of my key takeaways from this is that lettuce is quite diverse in cultivation. Partly this is because lettuce is also a species complex and there are some interspecies hybrids and partly just because it has accumulated a lot of morphological mutation in cultivation. Like domestic lettuce, Miner’s lettuce has some obvious natural diversity. However, in cultivation what we find is just Claytonia perfoliata one species of the three species complex and none of the hybrids or subspecies.
So with some seed collecting and sharing we could grow much more diverse populations of Miners lettuce than what is commonly available!
I took this idea to heart and launched a garden project. I purchased some Claytonia perfoliata seed.
Claytonia Seeds (Miner’s Lettuce) | Johnny’s Selected Seeds (johnnyseeds.com) Claytonia perfoliata, Indian or Miner's Lettuce – Larner Seeds
Much of which is now grown in the Netherlands. It is a tricky seed crop as it tends to disperse the seed as it ripens!
Then over several years I collected seeds and plants of both subspecies of Claytonia rubra both Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra from my sister’s place on Vashon Island in Washington and Claytonia rubra ssp. depressa from along the street I live on in Ronan Montana. In my valley the Claytonia rubra ssp. depressa is extremely short. I doubt as this is not a key characteristic, that the entire subspecies found in other states is this short but ours here in the Mission Valley of Western Montana is extremely short. It is so short that it is difficult to harvest leaves! I would use the botanical term appressed as in the leaves are appressed to the ground.
So, the result of growing these three types together for multiple years has been that Claytonia perfoliata and Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra have declined precipitously especially during late hard freezes and only local ecotype very short Claytonia rubra ssp. depressa has truly thrived in my garden. To date I haven’t detected any interspecies or even any intersubspecies hybridization.
I still think common garden experiments with, wildland seed collection of, and seed trading of the different species, hybrids, and subspecies of the miner’s lettuce species complex have some promise towards developing more diversity in Miner’s lettuce as a garden crop. Mutation and hybridization of the species complex within gardens also has some potential. My experience with the local ecotype easily outcompeting the introduced ecotypes makes perfect sense. If you introduce a variable grex of a vegetable in your garden you can reasonably expect that the best adapted material will survive and this is consistent with Joseph’s methodology. Clearly the local ecotype that has evolved at lower elevations in the Mission Valley since the last ice age is the best adapted Claytonia in my garden.
Here is a thread about it on the OSSI board. Miner's Lettuce
On another note:
Foraging Miner’s Lettuce
In some areas of California Claytonia is so abundant that you can easily and abundantly harvest it. It was like that at a research ranch in the Sierra Foothills where I worked on some experiments in 2007.
In 2016/2017 I helped a Southern California author who I met when I last worked in California work on an edible plant book for Idaho. He looked at the species range and put Miner’s Lettuce in the book.
Foraging Idaho: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods (Foraging Series): Christopher Nyerges: 9781493031900: Amazon.com: Books
I pointed out to him that it isn’t so abundant in the Northern Rockies. Though shortly after I found an abundant patch of Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra in a recent burn while looking for morel mushrooms. I also saw abundant Claytonia rubra in a second burned area while hiking with my wife.
I’ve also seen it occasionally in very small patches along trails and roads- sometimes a single plant. I would discourage foraging from a single plant or just a few plants. I would suggest seeking out recent burned areas to find abundant populations instead as those single plants help to produce the seeds that become abundant populations after a wildfire. Even then, it would be best to leave quite a bit to reseed itself.
I do support foraging as a botanist and an educator. I believe that it is a great way to combat plant blindness and introduce many new people to the study of plant identification.
All three species (and many unreported crosses and variants) you mention above, @WilliamGrowsTomatoes , also grow wildly and rampantly among the Western slopes and valleys of the so called Cascades and into the Coastal Ranges - all the way into Northern Washington and coastal SW BC. They certainly aren’t range map restricted to Cali (not that you were implying that I am simply sharing). There’s also a cool overlap zone within this range where ‘Claytonia tuberosa’ starts to hide its heads below ground, so to speak. My experiences working with wild plants is beyond the nutrition and familiarization with the plants, the clear exposure and observations over time of the vast crosses occurring beyond the Botanists’ eyes. This was no more true than my willow work up and down the Willamette Valley into the Chehalis watershed - there are crosses and naturalized hybrids occurring broadly. The map is not the territory. I digress. And, I say all this as an enthusiast and supporter: ‘Flora of th Pacific Northwest’ is still my hiking bible (both the original expands volumes and the newer 2nd edition). What an incredible baseline trove of discovery and expertise.
I personally have never found the Miners lettuce tastes or textures all that appealing - in Oregon for example I would quite easily
favor the lemony robust tastes of ‘Oxalis oregana’ to adorn my wild and mixed spring greens salads. To each their own. Regardless, where abundant it is a bountiful ephemeral offering. I consider it our temperate ground dweller companion to the tropical vining ‘Malabar spinach’ - of which I’m also not very fond of.
My links kind of partially broke in my original post as I typed it up in Word first and somehow the formatting wasn’t compatible, but I was sort of intrigued by the range map I found for Claytonia rubra ssp. depressa because it excluded MT entirely. It left me quite curious as to if Peter Lesica might have made a mistake there. Here in MT all three species are represented though most of it is Claytonia rubra. ssp rubra. Also if you look at the range maps for the three species they extend pretty far east in places. Map: Claytonia rubra subsp. rubra
Like this one here it looks like Claytonia rubra. ssp. rubra hits the black hills of South Dakota!
Still, I like Tommy’s photo where he found all three species in the same area of the San Bernardino NF
When I was working last in California out of Santa Barbara my wife and I went on a few little adventures around and I saw some variants that were a bit xeric adapted that I was pretty excited about. It would be lovely to run around for a field season and really get some diverse collections from these.
I just got the second edition of Flora of PNW both at work and home. Haven’t really used it yet though. Which is about where I am still with the 2013 edition of the Jepson Manual. I mostly just need Lesica’s 2012 flora for Montana though right now. Everything else is pretty much reference at the moment.
You sound like a better botanist of Salix than I am.
I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere though a past botanist has made careful publications about some of the variations in Claytonia and Salix that aren’t currently noted as taxonomically distinct. Some of those guys did remarkable work which was largely ignored until recently when proved by modern genetics.
Oh baby those xeric adaptations would be fascinating. I still find patches of Claytonia spp on my 68 acre farmstead but geeeze they are so diminutive and put the ‘emeral’ in ephemeral Nothing remitely like the weeks of possible overlapping harvests in the infinitely more Mediterrean climate tendencies of Central Oregon. There’s a reason Frank Morton and others thrive with their greens breeding in that incredible Willamette Valley - greens LOVE that entire schtick.
I know the additions and updates to the 2nd ed. are fun and necessary but I have a very difficult time leaving the original multiple volume sets. Those are gold mines. What an incredible tome of endless study and consultation.
Yes, xeric adapted plants would be great! I can totally see why you got excited over those.
I’ve never tried miner’s lettuce, but I’ve heard it tastes good, and my daughter tried some on a camping trip last year – apparently it grows wild in our mountains, just not down here. She liked it a lot.
That’s a species I’m thinking I want to grow, both because my daughter liked the flavor and because it looks quite pretty.
William , just some random comments , it’s not hard at all to harvest the seeds. When they start falling you will see them. Then rip them out, put them on a plastic tarp in a shed. Secure it so the wind can’t blow it over. Kick em around once a week and you’ll have plenty once they’ve dried.
I’ve had up to a pound. Be carefull sowing. It’s easily too much. They cover pretty well then but their growth gets stunted then.l like to take out “bouquets”, leaving the biggest.
I wonder how it gets pollinated. It sports the loveliest tiny winy white flowerheads (on this side of the Atlantic anyway.), in the middle of a round leaf.
They’re so small. Is it wind or tiny flies?
I’ve just come from Holland where i’ve seen it growing wild in nothing but sand. It rarely grows into much more than a few leaves in the sand.
Unlike in the hoop house where i use is a groundcover around other crops, it gets something like ten inch wide.
It must be hard as nails for it to thrive now. We’ve had minus 12 Celsius this year.
I agree it’s taste is not very exciting, but it’s texture is unrivaled. I use it like a filler and support it with more exciting tastes.
Hère we see a collection of doomed to reproduce Claytonia in a unnatural habitat.
Here is the miners lettuce I have in NE WA. I actually spent days researching before I decided it was actually miners lettuce because it look so different from what is pictured online. The small leaves are the same and that was my deciding factor. The full sized leaves are very different however. It is on the shorter side height wise and there is some coloring on the underside of the leaves.
I’m going to have to look for this. I know we get these tiny flowers in a couple places early in spring but I hadn’t IDed them. I don’t recognize the plants as anything I’ve seen here myself. If I don’t find any I may see if anyone has seed of it to share because initial research says it grows in Ohio.
Angel that is Claytonia rubra because the first basal leaves are not linear and because the stem leaves are clasping but not fully united into a disk. The leaf blades look more delta shaped then spatula shaped so I would say that it is ssp. rubra. So Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra and that is why it doesn’t look like the photographs which are mainly Claytonia perfoliata.
Kadence you might be a little far East to find a wild stand of this. I don’t think that it makes it much further east than the Black hills of South Dakota.
Hmm. Just looking at the leaves I wonder if it is really a very short variety of Claytonia rubra ssp. rubra and not a very short variety of Claytonia rubra ssp. depressa which is known from my local Mission Mountain range, but I found this in the Mission Valley floor. I should check the flowers to see if they are 3 mm or less in diameter.
On their key I count nine subspecies amongst the three species. Hmm wonder if FNA has any more subspecies?- Nope same nine.
Ooh found another fun blog post on my former colleague Tommy’s site. hybrid | Claytonia.org
I dare you to read it and not get excited about the morphological diversity possible within the Claytonia perfoliata group.
Me, builder/gardener and the yuppies in Paris paying twenty euros for a hundred gram share the love for this crop.
I just thin it, over the winter. Harvesting the smaller individuals growing as a ground cover.
Not often i see such poor soils as the one on the photo. It’s your garden? Challenging to say the least.
When i had high hopes for this crop i harvested hundreds of “bouquets” containing about sixty leaves and dried them on discarded tarps that were used to cover roofs i worked on.
After turning them over a couple of times, i had half a kilo of seeds. Feels magical to move your bands through it.
I kind of stopped doing it that way because i had to push it upon folk at seed swaps as a “newety”. Must be growing in quite dôme gardens by now.
As i’ve seen it growing in the dunes of Holland on nothing but sand i believe it has great potential. It’s a superfood, full of oméga fatty acids. After fish the food source containing the most.
It has the potential to feed the world in times nothing will grow.
I’ll gladly will work with you looking for crosses if you send me some.
What you are seeing is an artificial soil horizon I have created! It is a layer of fine sand I purchased from a local farmer who had an alfalfa / lucerne field or Medicago sativa that he could not keep watered. He realized it was a sand deposit and started selling sand. My natural soil is a 7 inch or 17.5 cm layer of humus rich clay loam over a 7 inch or 17.5 cm clay accumulation layer. I have found that my garden is much easier to weed with the addition of a sand layer and that it is a better soil. Though there is a silt dependency there. My farmer’s sand has a lot of silt in it. The local gravel pits sand has less silt even unwashed. I wish someone would sell silt! I can even rototill the sand layer and because it is sand it is always flowable. My native soil clumps when wet.
I read some claytonia articles. Oh, my heck. That’s an exciting species complex. About like the brassicas… I wonder if opuntia is another species complex with potential for wild diversity?
