camas in seattle

today i am taking a relaxing day in seattle at my folk's house, where i was born. this morning i read some articles in local papers about topics like bicycling, urban farming, and community building.
i read one short article in which it says that the landscape design of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Campus, by GGN, includes plantings of camas bulbs. in further research i found this article online that tells us: "Edible plants include 1,715 blueberry plants, 250 native evergreen huckleberries, 117 native thimbleberries, and over 10,000 native camas bulbs."
to me this is very exciting news! for such a high profile project to take this step in restoring native habitat and reducing their ecological footprint gives me hope.



for very detailed information about camas you can check out the information here. this paragraph stuck out to me:

Many of the traditional camas gathering sites, such as Weippe Prairie and Camas Prairie in Idaho and the Willamette Valley in Oregon, have been converted to agriculture. The average size of a camas patch needed to feed a five person family was 2.7 ha (Thoms 1989). Camas roots are hard to find now. Restoration of camas prairies and access to camas bulbs are priorities of many Indian people. At one time, “When camas was in bloom in wet meadows, the flowers grow so thickly that they look like a blue lake” (Murphey 1959).