Tag: World Wetlands Day

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World Wetlands Day 2026

Five crop plants that grew in Halstead Meadow during the summer of 2022, in patches burned in the 2021 KNP Complex fire.

Wetlands are wonderful places, as people have known for thousands of years. Their rich soil and abundant water make for excellent crop land, usually once some of the abundance of water has been drained away. At Halstead Meadow, a wetland in Sequoia National Park, a group of crop plants sprouted out from the ashes in patches burned in the 2021 KNP Complex wildfire. These agricultural plants – wheat, sunflower, millet, sorghum, and corn – grew only in the summer of 2022, and only in areas where the KNP fire had burned away the top 4-6 inches of organic wetland soil. The seeds had probably been lying dormant, buried under wetland soil, since they were planted over a century ago before Sequoia National Park existed. Back then a cattleman named Sam Halstead had used this meadow for grazing, and apparently for growing a few crops! I collected leaf and seed samples from each of these plants and they’re sitting in my freezer. I’m hoping to find a expert in crop varieties who would be willing to analyze the genetics of these plants to see if they belong to old crop lineages. Wetlands preserve a wealth of fascinating stories.

Four to six inches of soil depth were burned away in 2021. In 2022, when this picture was taken, crops such as the wheat seen here in the foreground were found growing out of the exposed soil layer within the burned patches.
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World Wetlands Day 2025

Introducing camas lily (Camassia quamash), a lovely purple-flowered bulb that grows in wetlands throughout the western US. Individuals can live 15-20 years, and won’t flower until they’re 3 or 4 years old. Native Americans, especially in the Pacific Northwest, consumed the bulbs as a major part of their diet. They fed camas bulbs to Lewis and Clark’s starving exploration party as they moved across what is now western Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington. This summer I’ll be starting a project at Weippe Prairie, part of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail and Nez Perce National Historical Park. Our main goal will be to reestablish the wetland and ecological conditions to create dense patches of camas lily. Prior to large-scale agriculture, camas covered entire wetland valleys for miles. On June 12, 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through Weippe Prairie on their return home and marveled that “the quawmash is now in blume and from the colour of its bloom at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.”