Plant · P-261

Skirret

Sium sisarum

Skirret's edible root cluster tastes like a cross between carrot and parsnip with a nutty note - eaten raw, cooked, or roasted as a coffee substitute - but it only thrives with abundant moisture through the growing season, so it belongs at a permanently damp spot like a pond margin or the tail of a swale rather than in an ordinary irrigated bed. It looks enough like its poisonous relatives to be genuinely dangerous: the same wet ground that suits it also suits water hemlock, one of the most lethal plants in North America, so it needs a clearly defined, labeled bed and nobody should ever forage a white-flowered root from open water anywhere nearby. Otherwise it is an easy, pest-resistant clumping perennial that dies back each winter and returns, propagated by dividing the crown rather than spreading on its own.