Plant · P-289

Miners Lettuce

Claytonia perfoliata

Miner's lettuce is a small, mild-flavoured salad green with a slightly mucilaginous texture that also works as a living winter ground cover, carpeting bare soil with rosettes that would otherwise crust and bake. It germinates in autumn, crops through winter and early spring, and dies back before summer heat arrives, so it is grown on exactly that calendar rather than fought into a hot season. Every part above ground is edible - leaves, stalks and flowers - and it is exceptionally high in vitamin C, the trait behind its name: it fed California gold miners a scurvy-preventing green. Left to seed once, it returns unaided every autumn on its own, and disappears completely by early summer with no risk of persisting into a colony.