It's a tall - to seven feet - purple-pink-flowered and showy member of the Evening Primrose (Onagraceae) Family. It often grows in dense, spectacular clusters, particularly after fires. This, of course, is where its common name comes from, though it's a bit of a purple-pink fire in its own right. It's found in moist soil in cool areas throughout much of North America from valleys to high elevations in the mountains. Being so attractive is a siren's call to gardeners, but it's notoriously aggressive in the garden, spreading by underground stems.
Most of us (still) know it by its generic Epilobium, but as a result of a bit of genetic work, it has been determined that it belongs in the Chamerion genus. Now that's taking I.D.-ing a plant to the next level.
Being such a ubiquitous plant, you've got to figure Fireweed has had its share of uses. And indeed this has been the case, but with a little something extra in its lore. The Ojibwa pounded the root to make a poultice which was used to draw the inflammation from boils and carbuncles. Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest used the stem fibers to make fishnets and twine, and ate the young leaves and shoots and sweet gelatinous pith. The little something extra involves beekeepers and WWII.
Rich in nectar, Fireweed is popular in the insect world. As it is quick to pop up not only after fires, but in the wake of logging operations, beekeepers in the past in coastal Washington and Oregon follow these operations, moving every five to seven years.
As for WWII, well, Lewis Gannett wrote this in the New York Herald Tribune in 1944: "London, paradoxically, is the gayest where she has been the most blitzed. The wounds made this summer by flying bombs are, of course, still raw and bare, but cellars and courts shattered into rubble by the German raids of 1940-'41 have been taken over by an army of weeds which have turned them into wild gardens, sometimes as gay as any tilled by any human hands. There is the brilliant rose-purple plant that Londoners call rose-bay willow herb. Americans call it fireweed because it blazes wherever a forest fire has raged. It will not grow in shade, but there is little shade as yet in the London ruins. It likes potash, and the ruins are full of wood ash. It sweeps across the pockmarked city and turns what might have been scars into flaming beauty. You see it everywhere - great meadows of it in Lambeth, where solid tracts were blitzed; waves of it about St. Paul's. Behind Westminster Abbey bits of it are high up where second-story fireplaces still cling to the hanging walls. The fireweed plant gives the characteristic rose-purple and green color tone to what look like vacant lots all over the London - the blitz sites."
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