Tastes Like Sweet Peas. More Vitamin C Than an Orange. Why Do We Only Photograph It?

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A tree blooms in front yards across half the country each spring, and almost nobody who owns one knows the flowers are food. Every magenta blossom on it can be eaten raw, straight off the branch, with no preparation at all. They taste like sweet green peas with a squeeze of lemon behind them, and by weight they carry more vitamin C than an orange.

This is how a food tree became a decoration.

George Washington planted them at Mount Vernon and wrote them into his diary on March 3, 1785. Thomas Jefferson planted them at Monticello. Long before either man, Native peoples across the eastern woodlands ate the flowers raw or boiled, roasted the seeds inside the pods, pickled the tight unopened buds the way a cook uses capers, and cooked the young green pods like snow peas. The tree is a legume, the same family as garden peas, beans and lentils, and the seed runs 22.9% to 27.5% protein on a zero-moisture basis. Lentil territory, hanging on a branch in a suburban yard.

So what happened?

Part of it was a name, borrowed from a European relative and a legend about Judas Iscariot, that followed settlers across the Atlantic and stuck to the wrong species. But the larger answer is money. Until the 1990s, every new variety of this tree arrived by chance seedling. Then a formal breeding program went to work on it, funded by the nursery trade, and the tree was redesigned on purpose. The grant record is published, and the stated goal was novel ornamental characters. Not flavor, not yield, not nutrition.

The cultivars that came out of that work are patented, and the claims are worth reading closely. They cover weeping growth habit and variegated foliage. Nowhere does anyone mention that a human being can eat the tree. Every patented specimen carries a royalty that funds the next round of breeding. Nobody has ever owed a royalty on a flower picked and eaten in a driveway, and there is no revenue in a free lunch, so there was never a research budget for one.

The turn in this episode is that the nutritional data exists anyway, gathered by accident. In 2017, researchers at North Carolina State University measured the anthocyanin pigments in the flowers, because color is what sells an ornamental tree. What they found was the same class of antioxidant pigment that makes blueberries and red cabbage worth putting on a nutrition label, at 2,263 to 8,730 milligrams per kilogram of dry flower. The people selling the tree measured what was valuable inside it, then printed a tag that said full sun to partial shade.

The episode closes with the practical part. When it blooms in your region, which parts to pick, how the sweet half of the blossom differs from the bitter half, and why every cultivar is edible regardless of what the patent covers.

If you have one in the yard, you have been walking past dinner every spring.

📚 Sources:

– Founders Online, National Archives. “Diary Entry: 3 March 1785.” In The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 4. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
– Perkins-Veazie, Penelope, Guoying Ma, and Dennis Werner. “Anthocyanin Pigments in Redbud (Cercis spp.) Flowers.” Journal of Horticultural Science and Research 1, no. 1 (2017): 13-18.
– Roberts, Denny J., Dennis J. Werner, Philip A. Wadl, and Robert N. Trigiano. “Inheritance and Allelism Studies in Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis L.).” Horticulture Research 2 (2015): 15049. doi:10.1038/hortres.2015.49
– United States Plant Patent PP23,998. “Cercis Tree Named ‘Whitewater’.” Washington, DC: United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2013.
– United States Plant Patent PP27,712. “Cercis canadensis Tree Named ‘NCCC1’.” Washington, DC: United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2017.
– Hatch, Laurence C. “A Checklist of Cercis (Redbud) Cultivars.” HortScience 53, no. 2 (2018): 148-160. doi:10.21273/HORTSCI12572-17
– Sullivan, Janet. “Cercis canadensis, Eastern Redbud.” In Fire Effects Information System. Missoula, MT: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 1994.
– Brakie, Melinda. “Plant Fact Sheet: Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis L.” Nacogdoches, TX: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, 2010.
– Robertson, Kenneth R. “Cercis: The Redbuds.” Arnoldia 36, no. 2 (1976): 37-49.
– Geneve, Robert L. “Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis L.) and Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum L.).” In Trees III, 142-151. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1991.

#Foraging #WildEdibles #Gardening #ForgottenKnowledge

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