River Beauty

Another photo from a wonderful day along the Icefields Parkway (Highway 93) west of Banff and Lake Louise, on 10 August 2013. Our destination was beautiful Bow Lake, so that my friend could check on a Liverwort (non-vascular plant) that she had seen there recently. The title for this image comes from the colourful plant in the foreground, called River Beauty. There were a few people out taking photos in this area, so it was a bit of a challenge to try and photograph in between them : )

"Chamerion latifolium (formerly Epilobium latifolium) is a species of flowering plant in the evening primrose family known by the English common names Dwarf Fireweed and River Beauty Willowherb. It has a circumboreal distribution, appearing throughout the northern regions of the Northern Hemisphere, including subarctic and Arctic areas such as snowmelt-flooded gravel bars and talus, in a wide range of elevations.

This arctic plant provides valuable nutrition for the Inuit, who eat the leaves raw, boiled with fat, or steeped in water for tea, the flowers and fruits raw, and as a salad with meals of seal and walrus blubber. Every part of this plant is edible, tasting much like spinach, and is also known in the Canadian tundra as River Beauty. It is the national flower of Greenland, where it is known by the Greenlandic name niviarsiaq, which means "little girl"." From Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamerion_latifolium

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