WILD HYACINTH (Camas. Quamash) 

 Camassia scillioides (Raf.) Cory 



April - May 



Grassy woods, prairies 



When the last glacier departed, it left broad 

 blue lakes on what later became the Illinois 

 country. When the lakes grew less and the 

 vegetation pushed in from every side until there was only a pond of open 

 water in the middle, until that, too, was gone, there came into existence 

 broad marshes to take the place of the lakes. And then the marshes grew 

 drier and became the wet prairie of Illinois. 



The soil was deep and black and matted with undecayed roots of 

 prairie grasses and marsh plants. And for acres, in the old prairie, 

 flowers bloomed from the bed of what used to be an ancient lake. Blue 

 as the lake water itself, the wild hyacinths stretched for miles and glinted 

 like pale water in the sun. The delicate, waving spikes of six-petaled, 

 pale blue and lavender flowers, tufted with white stamens, stood tall 

 above the grass-like leaves. It was May, and the wild hyacinths were all 

 in bloom. 



It was to these broad beds of hyacinths that the Indians came later 

 in the summer to dig the succulent bulbs of what they called quamash, 

 an important food plant. 



Although the great beds of wild hyacinths vanished with tlie plowing 

 of the prairie, stretches of the original ])rairie soil still remain along 

 railroad right-of-ways, and here many hyacinths still are to be found. 

 In patches like pale blue water, the slender, fluffy spikes of lavender-blue 

 and white flowers nod in the prairie winds ; the flowers may be fewer, but 

 those which remain are unchanged ii'om those which decorated the old 

 prairie after the lakes departed, and were food for Indians who gathered 

 them. 



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