Starting with the Travel Tip and the Gift Idea
Last summer Pepe and Maria went to Alaska and discovered stunning vistas of entire mountain sides covered with fireweed in bloom. Here are three pictures taken by Pepe. The flower is about an inch across.
When Pepe and Maria got back, they gave me a jar of fireweed jelly. With English muffin season now in full swing, last week I tore into this jelly. Below is a picture; you can see that they jelly has been nearly all consumed.
The Question for this E-mail
I got to wondering why this is called fireweed jelly The question for this e-mail is:
What is the fireweed component of this jelly?
To answer this question, I inspected the list of ingredients and saw that the very first ingredient is "fireweed essence." (See close-up of the label below.) This stumped me. What is fireweed essence? Before looking into this in detail, let's find out about fireweed the plant.
Fireweed the Plant
My Introduction to Fireweed
Fireweed is a wildflower in the evening primrose family that is common in Massachusetts and, in fact, grows throughout the temperate northern hemisphere; the first picture below shows the North American range of fireweed.. Fireweed was vividly brought to my attention in the book by Bernd Heinrich, In a Patch of Fireweed, which I read in Aug 1989. In the title essay, Heinrich is standing in a patch of fireweed and catching bumblebees; he measures the temperature of their flight muscles as part of his study of the thermoregulation of insects. The combination of Heinrich being a favorite writer and fireweed having a beautiful flower has made it a favorite plant of mine. This plant is in part eye-catching because it can grow to be eight feet tall (but usually four or five feet) and in part because it spreads by rhizomes (13 Nov 2015), which means that it tends to form extensive, breathtaking stands. Pictures taken from the Internet are below; many are from Alaska.
(Continued in Part 2)
