T'axobdaloxid

Pale-leaved spires bearing tiny green goblets with ragged pink collars emerge in my cool damp garden. Never planted by me but perhaps some previous incumbent, they turn out to be 'fringe cups', native to the Pacific coast from California to Alaska and now naturalised in some parts of the UK and Ireland.

Ethnobotany of  Western Washington  tells me that the Skagit people pound the whole plant,  boil it and drink it 'for any kind of sickness' especially loss of appetite. These indigenous dwellers of the Skagit river valley in what is now Washington state called the plant t'axobdaloxid  although we have no way of knowing how the word was pronounced. It does curiously resemble the unwieldy sort of name that modern drugs  are given. Botanists know it as Tellima grandiflora.

Also from the same neck of the (Pacific NW) woods is Tolmiea menziesii , piggyback plant,  to be found naturalised  not far away in the lower Gwaun valley (extra)