Camassia quamash (Common Camas)

Common Camas is one of the Pacific Northwest's most iconic native wildflowers and a plant with deep roots in regional history. Each spring, from May into June, the grassy meadows of western Oregon once turned entire swaths of blue-violet as vast camas populations bloomed across the landscape. Those flowers, each a star-shaped cluster of six petals on a slender stem rising one to two feet from strappy foliage, remain as beautiful today in a garden setting as they were in the wild prairies that inspired Lewis and Clark's accounts of the region.

The bulbs were a staple food for Indigenous peoples across the Pacific Northwest, including the Nez Perce, who introduced the plant to the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805. Slow pit-roasting converted the starchy bulbs into a sweet, fructose-rich food that stored well and was widely traded. That culinary and cultural history makes Camassia quamash both ecologically significant and genuinely fascinating to grow. Plant the bulbs in fall, about three to four inches deep, in moist to seasonally wet soil in full sun to partial shade.

Camas naturalizes beautifully in damp meadows, rain gardens, and around pond edges where the soil stays consistently moist through spring.