California buckwheat blooming in early July in an Inland canyon. (Pat Murkland photo)
By Pat Murkland
Hulaqal (Cahuilla), Hunaaqac (Serrano) or California Buckwheat (in Latin, Eriogonum fasciculatum) is a classic native plant of Southern California summers — not a surfing, carefree summer filled with postcard views and the balm of ocean breezes, but instead a searing Inland summer in which firefighters stay ready amid harsh landscapes as the heat rises and the wind blows. In fall, the native buckwheats turn steadily deeper and deeper brown, and leaves curl under, until some may wonder whether the plants are even alive. Indeed, as Southern California’s recent fires continue to burn in our canyons and across the mountains, native buckwheat is sometimes seen only as a fuel.
But for Native Americans, native buckwheat is an important and powerful medicine and food plant. Buckwheat also is a brambling backbone of the natural world, holding interconnecting powers that help keep insects, birds, and animals (and in older times, the first people) thriving amid harsh and waterless heat.
Flowers change with the seasons from white and pinkish to deeper and deeper browns. (Pat Murkland photo)
Medicines and food
Southern California boasts several native buckwheat varieties that grow from coast to deserts. The California buckwheat plant is one that tells the story of our foothill and canyon landscapes with their sages and chaparrals. John Peabody Harrington recorded buckwheat in Serrano as húnakt∫ and C. Hart Merriam as hoo-un-kuts (1). Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano) tells us it’s hunaaqac. In our Sept. 16, 2020, News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, Ernest Siva shared memories of buckwheat and how his mother, Katherine Howard, ate buckwheat as a food. She also used buckwheat as a medicine and eyewash.
“Wild buckwheat was used for medicinal purposes by the Serrano,” anthropologist Michael K. Lerch says. “Merriam (1979) made a parenthetical note of ‘eyedrops’ in his listing for the Kitanemuk. Katherine Howard indicated a similar use, and recalled that her mother boiled the plant into a tea which was used as eyewash. While she did not remember the specific parts of the plant that were used, she did note that it was picked ‘after the tops had turned brown.’ "(2)
Buckwheat gone brown, a sign that fall is here. (Pat Murkland photo)
Buckwheat also is important to a host of bird and animal seed eaters. For many Native American people, native buckwheat seeds were important food. The Cahuilla gathered the seeds from June through September and “edible shoots were available in the desert from February to May,” according to Katherine Siva Saubel and Lowell John Bean. The Cahuilla made various teas to help headaches along with uterus, stomach, and intestinal challenges, while flowers made an eye wash. (3)
The Chumash stopped hemorrhages, purified the blood, fought fevers, and colds and coughs with teas made from varied buckwheat species. (4)
California buckwheat blooming in a summer sunset in an Inland canyon. (Pat Murkland photo)
Keystone Plants
Buckwheat (foreground) amid elderberry and other Inland canyon staples. (Pat Murkland photo)
Native buckwheats hold the natural world together.
Buckwheat starts out green enough, shooting upward out of the dirt here and there, sometimes unexpectedly. In early spring buckwheat is blooming with white and pinkish flowers. These flowers are loaded with nectar and become important food sources for pollinators, especially native bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, beetles, and birds.
Native buckwheat serves as a host species to at least 15 confirmed species of moths and butterflies, and as likely host to an amazing total of 36 species, according to the California Native Plant Society.
Illustration of a butterfly (Serrano) by a Morongo Reservation School student at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s February 2020 Native Voices Poetry Festival.
Type in your location and see how many different species of butterflies and moths that California buckwheat plants host in your area,
Buckwheat’s role as a keystone plant becomes more dramatic in the late, dry, summer months. When many other flowering plants are dormant or dead, buckwheat is still producing nectar. The flowers turn steadily more brown, taking on the color of earth as they seem to feed from nothing but the dirt. As their nectar continues providing feasts for all the insects, all the animals and birds that eat insects continue to have a steady food supply, as do the birds and animals that eat those birds and animals … on and on. Buckwheat stands also serve as a shelter for birds and animals alike. It’s truly a plant that keeps the world going through dry, hot months.
Buckwheat is an icon of resiliency. After the Apple Fire in late July and early August, buckwheat was one of the first plants to reappear in our canyon, already growing out of the ash-coated ground amid a fierce heat wave.
Buckwheat starts growing back after the Apple Fire. (Pat Murkland photo)
Ernest Siva: A Medicine Plant
Plants that some view as useless “weeds” often are anything but.
Notes
1. and 2. Michael K. Lerch, personal communication, n.d.
3. Lowell John Bean and Katherine Siva Saubel, Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian knowledge and usage of plants, 1972, Malki-Ballena Press, p. 72.
4. Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California, © 2007 by Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and Heyday Books, p. 84.
Buckwheat makes a comeback one month after the Apple Fire. (Pat Murkland Photo)
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