Montiaceae

Small, fleshy, cool-season herbs, most of them western North American, with succulent leaves and delicate five-petalled flowers. Many grow from corms or thickened taproots and die back entirely once summer heat arrives — an ephemeral strategy that makes them conspicuous in spring and invisible by July.

The family is a recent segregate. These plants sat in Portulacaceae for most of botanical history, and molecular work split that group apart; older references will place Lewisia and Claytonia under purslane. Both families sit in the Caryophyllales, the order whose pigments are betalains rather than anthocyanins — a genuine chemical marker distinguishing this lineage from nearly all other flowering plants.

This is a food family, not a medicine family, and it would be dishonest to present it otherwise.

Bitterroot is the clearest case. It is Montana’s state flower, it gave its name to a mountain range, a valley and a river, and its starchy root was a staple and a trade good of first importance across the Columbia Plateau — traded by weight against horses. It has, as far as the published literature goes, no pharmacological or phytochemical study of any kind. Its entry here is ethnobotanical and cultural rather than therapeutic.

Miner’s lettuce earned its name during the California Gold Rush, when miners ate it against scurvy. That is a real and effective use, and it is straightforwardly nutritional: the plant is a good source of vitamin C. Several Claytonia species were similarly important spring greens and corm foods across North America and Siberia.

The family’s honest medical summary is that its members are nutritious, historically vital as food, and essentially unstudied as medicines.

Very little is established. The family sits within the betalain-producing Caryophyllales, so betalain pigments rather than anthocyanins are expected, though this has not been examined in most members. The edible species carry vitamin C, ordinary flavonoids, and — as with many succulent leafy greens — appreciable oxalates, which is the one practical caution attaching to eating them in quantity.

Lewisia rediviva itself has no published constituent profile. Its roots are notably starchy and develop a distinctive bitterness, hence the name, but the compound responsible has not been identified.