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Wood-Sorrel
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Wood-sorrel, a seemingly perennial weed with many delicate light green branches, looks like some sort of clover or shamrock on first glance. Each of its leaves has three inversely heart-shaped leaflets like clover leaflets, easy to chew and acidly sour-tasting. In direct sunlight the leaves tend to fold up like little umbrellas, with each leaflet folding inward along the crease down its center. Called a woodland flower, wood-sorrel seems to grow best in the shade and possibly in rich soil.
There are at least four subspecies in the wood-sorrel family: common wood-sorrel, yellow wood-sorrel, violet wood-sorrel, and creeping wood-sorrel. (Note: I believe the species name Oxalis acetosella is not longer used, but am not certain.) All are considered quite edible except creeping wood-sorrel.
Common wood-sorrel (Oxalis montana) has white or pale pink flowers with prominent pink veins on the petals, blooming from May to July. It thrives in cool, moist woods of all kinds from Canada and the northern U.S. to Tennessee and North Carolina. The plant grows 3 to 4 inches high (7.5 to 10 centimeters).
Yellow wood-sorrel (Oxalis stricta) is a perennial and stands more upright than the other wood-sorrels and has pale yellow flowers that bloom from May to October. After the flowers, the pointy seedpods grow at sharp angles from their bent stems,jutting straight up. A widespread weed, it lives on waste ground and lawns, and has been seen springing up between domesticated flowers and shrubs in gardens. It grows 6 to 15 inches high (15 to 37.5 centimeters).
Violet wood-sorrel (Oxalis violacea) is a perennial and has rose-purple flowers with flaring petals, blooming from April to July. It grows in open woods, banks, and prairies from Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts to Texas and Florida. It grows 4 to 8 inches high (10 to 20 centimeters).
Creeping wood-sorrel (Oxalis corniculata) is a creeping perennial with yellow flowers that bloom from April until frost. It has deflexed seedpods and large, brownish stipules. (Stipules are leaflike plant parts that grow on the bases of the leafstalks.) The plant thrives in waste places everywhere and grows 6 to 10 inches high (15 to 25 centimeters).
Yellow wood-sorrel, the one I am most familiar with, grows small, simple flowers with five petals, then relatively long green seed pods with five flat or concave sides, tapering to an abrupt point at the top. Inside the five compartments of the pods are many seeds smaller than the heads of pins. I believe the tiny seeds turn from white to dark brown as they ripen, but I'm not sure. Sometimes if you twist or bend the green seedpods, the seeds pop out like "pop rocks" in rapid-fire succession.
All kinds of wood-sorrel leaves, can be eaten raw in salads, as garnishes, as snacks, or to flavor soups or sauces, and have an enjoyable tart, sour, almost lemony taste; the flowers and seedpods are thought to be about the same. When cooked they seem to lose their flavor and wilt, turning a light, dull grayish brown, like ashes; evidently their taste is leached out into the cooking water. They can be made into a lemonade-like drink by steeping them in hot water for ten minutes, chilling, and adding sugar. A recipe for a wood-sorrel butter sauce for scallops can be found at the Food and Wine site. Wood-sorrel leaves are among the more palatable wild foods, but don't eat too much of them.
Wood-sorrels tend to be rich in Vitamin C. Creeping wood-sorrel leaves have been chewed as a remedy for nausea, mouth sores, and sore throats; poulticed fresh on cancers, old sores, and ulcers; and made into tea for fevers, urinary infections, and scurvy. The other wood-sorrels are not reported to have medicinal value.
The whole yellow wood-sorrel plant yields a orange or yellow dye.
Warning: The sour taste of wood-sorrel comes from the oxalic acid it contains; as a result, eating too much wood-sorrel over a long period of time can inhibit your body's absorption of calcium and other nutrients, and irritate your digestive system. If you have kidney disease, kidney stones, rheumatoid arthritis, or gout, you should probably avoid foods containing oxalic acid. (More information on oxalic acid and oxalates can be found on the Yellow Wood Sorrel page of Kingdom: Plantae.) It would be difficult to confuse wood-sorrel with anything other than clover or black medick (which it does not closely resemble). Wood-sorrel is a common weed and not in danger of overharvesting, but you shouldn't eat bales of it at a time anyway.
Folk names for wood-sorrel are said to include "sour grass" (for obvious reasons) and "shamrock" (learn more about the shamrock legend on the red clover page); "Indian-sorrel", "lady's-sorrel", and "sheep's-clover"; "wood sour", "sour trefoil", "stickwort", "fairy bells", "Hallelujah", "cuckowes meat", "three-leaved grass", "surelle", "stubwort", "gowke-meat" (Scotch), "pain de coucou" (French), "seamsog" (Irish), and "iuliole" (Italian) (these last were taken from Botanical.com's wood-sorrel page). Oxalic acid, the chemical that makes wood-sorrel taste pleasantly sour, is also found in the similar-tasting but unrelated sheep-sorrel (a slightly less palatable plant). Creeping wood-sorrel is the only wood-sorrel the Peterson guides designate as alien. I recently painted a small, simple watercolor painting of yellow wood-sorrel. According to Wicca Craft, by Gerina Dunwich, wood-sorrel is thought to be associated with the planet Venus and sacred to all Triple Goddesses (because of its three joined leaflets).
An extensive description of wood-sorrel and its medicinal properties is on Botanical.com: A Modern Herbal. On Laurie Lacey's Wild World of Plants is a page on common wood-sorrel. Web of Species has a page on yellow wood-sorrel. The Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses site has a page on yellow wood-sorrel. Culpeper: The Complete Herbal has a page on wood sorrel and its uses and folklore. The University of Connecticut Department of Plant Science Integrated Pest Management Program site has a page on yellow wood-sorrel as a strawberry weed. The Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center site has a page on violet wood-sorrel. Apage on Oxalis europaea is on Wildflowers of Kentucky, a page on Bermuda sorrel (Oxalis pes-capre) is on the Native Plants of Montara Mountain site, and there's a page on western wood-sorrel, with a nice picture; I wasn't aware of any of these Oxalis species (they probably don't grow in my area).
If this page is too complicated, go to the brief profile instead.
The information in these pages is accurate to the best of my knowledge, but I make no guarantees about its accuracy, nor do I take responsibility for any damage or injury caused by use or misuse of this information.
Much of this information, especially the medicinal details, comes from A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, by Steven Foster and James A. Duke (Peterson Field Guides); A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants : Eastern and Central North America by Lee Allen Peterson, Roger Tory Peterson (Peterson Field Guides); the Kingdom: Plantae site; Moonwatcher; and A Modern Herbal (volumes one and two), as reprinted on Botanical.com.
