Yukon
Foraging for Fireweed
Yukon's official flower is a symbol of resilience, and a multi-purpose plant that keeps us rooted to the land.
Yukon
Foraging for Fireweed
Yukon's official flower is a symbol of resilience, and a multi-purpose plant that keeps us rooted to the land.
Halfway through our conversation about fireweed, Sylvie Gewehr stops.
"Oh, there's just the fireweed fluff starting to fly," she says, pointing out her window.
Outside her home in Haines Junction, Yukon, the plant we've spent the last half hour discussing is releasing its seeds. For weeks, its purple flowers have been giving way to fiery-red leaves and long seed pods. Now, in the final days of August, those pods are opening, sending tiny white seeds drifting through the air like snowflakes.
Around here, Sylvie tells me, people say that when the fireweed fluff begins to fly, winter is about six week's away.
Sylvie Gewehr. Photo: Jennifer Sugden
Sylvie Gewehr. Photo: Jennifer Sugden
Sylvie is the owner of Wildwood Spirit, which is based in Haines Junction, Yukon, just a heartbeat away from the imposing Saint Elias Mountain range that takes up the southwestern corner of the territory.
A wildcrafter and herbalist, she moved to this part of Canada in 2011, and has spent the years since learning about the plants that grow around her. She leads guided plant walks, grows medicinal herbs on her property, and gathers wild plants to turn into teas, tinctures, vinegars, salves and other preparations.
While she can speak to the unique properties of many local plants, few tell the story of the Yukon quite like fireweed.
It became the official floral emblem of the territory in 1957, chosen because it symbolizes resilience and renewal.
Fireweed is seemingly everywhere in the Yukon. It grows along the Alaska Highway, in the forest, and up into the subalpine. In July, its purple flowers line the roadsides. By late August and into September, its leaves turn red.
Fireweed in fall. Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
Fireweed in fall. Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
But fireweed is more than a familiar splash of colour on the landscape. As its name suggests, it is one of the first plants to appear after a wildfire.
"It helps to heal the landscape," Sylvie says.
When fire moves through the boreal forest, the canopy opens and the ground is scorched. Fireweed moves in quickly, spreading through underground rhizomes and seeds carried on the wind. In the first year after a fire, Sylvie says, there can be little more than blackened trunks and fireweed. Gradually, other plants begin to return.
Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
In the spring, the first shoots of fireweed push through the ground. When they are about the size of a finger and still tender, they can be collected and cooked. Sylvie prefers a simple method with butter, salt and pepper, much like you would do with young asparagus.
Then come the flowers.
Photo: Andrew Strain
Photo: Andrew Strain
For several weeks in July, they open gradually from the bottom of the stalk to the top. The bright pink-purple flowers are edible, and Sylvie has used them to make jelly and syrup. These days, she often packs the fresh flowers into apple cider vinegar and leaves them to infuse. The vinegar slowly takes on their deep colour and later finds its way into salad dressings.
Fireweed flower vinegar. Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
Fireweed flower vinegar. Photo: Sylvie Gewehr
She also dries the flowers for tea.
The leaves have their uses, too. They can simply be dried for tea, or fermented to make Ivan chai, a traditional Russian preparation that produces something closer in flavour to black tea, but without the caffeine.
Sylvie's favourite preparation is even simpler.
She picks five to ten fresh leaves from near the top of the plant, puts them in a two-litre mason jar with water and blends them. After straining out the fibres, what remains is a thick green drink that she finds especially refreshing during a Yukon summer.
“Fireweed is really good for healing,” Sylvie says. “It’s anti-inflammatory, and it’s also really good for the digestive system.”
After the first hard frost, the fibres inside the stems toughen enough that people can harvest them for weaving small baskets.
Sylvie has been paying attention to plants for much of her life. She started wildcrafting at 13 while growing up in France and Germany, later studied physiology and cellular biology, and brought that interest with her when she moved to Canada at 20. She arrived in the Yukon in 2011 almost by accident.
“I was obsessed with Canada,” she says. As a child, she imagined living in “a little cabin somewhere in the woods where I have more trees than humans for neighbours.”
After getting her master's degree in forest ecology in Québec, she drove across the country. By the time she reached the Yukon, it was late August, she was running out of money and winter was approaching. She decided to stay and work, figuring she would decide what came next once winter was over.
“But I never left.”
On her guided plant walks, Sylvie encourages people to touch and smell the plants, learning the small characteristics that can help identify them later. She talks about what can be eaten, what has traditionally been used medicinally and how different plants can be processed.
Just as importantly, she talks about how to harvest: knowing when a plant is abundant enough to take some, how much to leave behind, using clean, sharp tools and making sure there is time to process whatever has been gathered when you get home.
That attention is at the heart of wildcrafting.
The simplest definition, she says, is harvesting wild herbs and transforming them into something useful. But that doesn't quite capture what it means to her.
“It’s also really connecting with the plants. It’s getting to know them,” she says. “I don’t ever want to see them just as a commodity, as a product that I go and gather in the woods and then sell to people.”
Instead, she returns to the same patches year after year and watches how the plants change with the seasons, how populations grow or shrink and how they respond to different weather conditions.
“I think it’s really important to have a relationship with the plants,” she says. “To know them, to spend time with them, and to understand that we’re part of the same ecosystem.”
The fireweed outside her window will soon be covered by snow,
The seeds blowing in the wind, floating out across Haines Junction will land, some in forests, some along roadsides, some in places where the ground has recently been disturbed. They will take root, ready to spring up when the snow melts.
“It’s absolutely beautiful.”