Fireweed: Alaska’s glowing icon

I could have brought to Alaska a passion for fishing, or for mountains, or volcanoes, glaciers, mighty rivers, wildlife. If so, I might have chosen a different icon. Salmon, Denali, the Matanuska Glacier, the Yukon River, a grizzly bear, moose, or bald eagle. But, though I treasure all of them, my passion is for wildflowers. And since those other icons never appear, in summer, without fireweed somewhere in the picture, it’s my icon.

It has now reached further iconic status from a more official source. Last summer I noticed my fireweed post from ten years ago was suddenly getting a lot of attention. A little exploring told me why: the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles issued a fireweed license plate. I was entranced by this, and sorry that as a Californian I couldn’t have one for my car. I have to settle for a refrigerator magnet.

The new design was a statewide effort, starting with a contest sponsored by the Alaska State Council on the Arts. A hundred artists submitted designs. Five judges narrowed the field to the six below, all a mix of Alaska icons. Alaskans then voted on their favorites on the Council’s website. Two featured fireweed. The winner was the one on the lower right, with Denali bathed in alpenglow in the background.

The artist, Sabrina Kessakorn of Anchorage, is an ecologist and artist. She credits two magical summers at Denali early in college with showing her how to combine her two loves of science and art. She wanted to come up with something common to the entire state. Since no wildlife fit that definition, she went with fireweed coupled with Denali.

It’s the flower of summer, and it’s everywhere. It can match my height in the temperate rainforest, or cap out at less than a foot in the alpine tundra. The roadsides are magenta. Open meadows are filled with it. The views of mountains and glaciers are seen through its tall, many-flowered racemes. Dark green spruce forests form backdrops to vast stands of it. It blooms, though more sparingly, in open forest.

The flowers last a long time, slowly opening from the lower stem to the tip. When I arrived in Valdez, a resident told me that summer is over when the bloom gets to the top. While blooming, they attract a variety of pollinators with sweet, rich nectar. Bees, butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds all take advantage of this bounty during the short Alaskan summer.

According to a beekeeper, fireweed bees produce white, spicy honey. Farmers’ markets sell pink fireweed jam. The fresh shoots, high in vitamins A and C, can be eaten like asparagus. The leaves are dried for a laxative tea. Native Alaskans dried the stem and rubbed the powder on their hands and faces to protect their skin from the cold. They rubbed the flowers on hides to make them waterproof.

As they bloom and fade, the ovaries under the petals continue to grow into long, slender pods. These are filled with so many seeds an individual plant can produce as much as 80,000. The pods continue the color scheme, sometimes almost as vividly as the flowers.

While flowers are still opening above them, the pods lower down start splitting open. They curve away from a slender, erect center into four thin bracts. Three to five hundred seeds from each pod start to float off on the slightest wind.

Once open, the curving bracts continue to encircle each other. As they dry, they turn gold in the sunlight. The leaves turn a bright, deep red, a memory of the vivid summer color lingering on the roadsides as the flowers disappear.

Eventually, all those seeds land somewhere and wait. If on open meadows or disturbed roadsides, they can germinate the next spring and bloom by their second year. If in the forest, they wait on nature, often for decades. At some point, fire sweeps through. Without the trees blocking the sun, or their roots taking all the water, fireweed is the first flower to burst into bloom. Thus its name.

 It isn’t just fire. It was the first plant to blossom in bomb craters in London in WWII. Roadsides are flanked with it soon after the surfacing crews have left. Drainage swales grow them in profusion. Once established, the roots create rhizomes, spreading mat-like through the soil, forming a strong network of plants.

So, in an Alaskan summer, it’s a constant thrill. Their range extends across much of North America, especially at higher altitudes. But I have never seen them grow elsewhere with the wild abandon of Alaskan fireweed.

By the time we left in mid-August, the seeds were floating through the air everywhere we went. Including in the truck. I picked a split pod one day. I could see the slender center ‘pole’. A tiny surface to hold all those hundreds of seeds, with their attendant feathery hairs.

As the four bracts curve away, they pull the seeds with them. I picked three pods that were just splitting open to see if I could catch this magic in the act. I put them on the dashboard of the truck, planning to take them back to the trailer and watch them.

A short time later, I realized they had all burst wide open, right there on the dashboard. The seeds started to float around. They drifted the whole day, showing a particular affinity for George, who had to keep blowing them away. I was utterly delighted.

The next day, when I got into the truck, not a single feather was to be seen anywhere. Even the curling bracts had disappeared from the dashboard, though I later found one on the floor.

Some seeds must have gone out the window on the trip, or the door when we got out. But the rest — hundreds of them — were still in there. So I have a vision of the truck, after many years of service, resting in the backyard of its final owner. Doors open, letting in sun and rain, dirt slowly accumulating. And all those fireweed seeds springing to life.

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