Thursday, July 26, 2012

Tasty fruit of the Mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum



It's in the Berberidaceae and it's not poisonous....go figure. Actually, the green fruit is poisonous and possibly the rind of ripe fruit. The inside is delicious and is reminiscent of a passion fruit both in taste and appearance. Apparently there was once an attempt to rid the Asian Collections of this native understory ground cover. That was before my time, or technically, between my times. We just live with it now. I was weeding Canada thistle today and came upon a colony with ripe fruit. I've eaten it before so I knew it was delicious, but I was curious to see what kind of information was online. I shouldn't have been surprised to see that the #2 hit on eating mayflowers was a blog that I follow with pleasure. She treated the subject so well that I'm just going to offer a link.

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