i’m planting rhubarb…as soon as the rain lets up!

How Alaska Became Home to Humongous Rhubarb

The leafy green grows to monstrous size under the midnight sun.

In 1914, the Seattle Star published a picture of a little girl triumphantly holding a huge, leafy stalk above her head like a spear. “Alaska is not all snow and ice,” the headline blared. “Rhubarb pies!”

The little girl, Dorothy, was something of a rhubarb princess, being one of the daughters of Henry D. Clark, who was known around Skagway, Alaska, as “the Rhubarb King.” Clark didn’t rule alone though. Across the United States, from Ohio to California, Washington to Illinois, various “rhubarb kings” were lauded for their ability to grow great quantities of the fruit-vegetable. (While a leafy green, rhubarb’s sour stalks are typically treated like a fruit and cooked with lots of sugar. The leaves are toxic.)

But Clark’s rule was different. For one thing, he farmed in Skagway, where summer days stretch to 19 hours. Rhubarb turned out to be a serendipitous choice. To the awed delight of early Alaskan farmers, not only does rhubarb like the cold, but it grows to monstrous size under the midnight sun.

According to Dr. Danny L. Barney, former curator of the Arctic and Subarctic Plant Gene Bank in Palmer, Alaska, cultivated rhubarb has a history of hardiness. Likely originating in chilly Tibet and China, it stepped off the steppes to become a valued medicine, with ancient doctors lauding its roots as effective against everything from cancer to the plague. Rhubarb eventually made its way to Russia, and from there to Western Europe, where it found a foothold in chilly England.

For centuries, rhubarb stayed more treatment than treat. As Barney writes in an email, “It was only after processed sugar became widely available [around the mid-1700s] that the acidic and sour stems became popular for culinary use.” Soon after, Barney believes, cultivated rhubarb arrived in Alaska when Russian trader Gregorii Shelikhov brought it with him to Kodiak Island in 1784.

By the 19th-century, cheap sugar had enabled rhubarb to become known as “the pie plant.” By mixing lots of sugar with its chopped stems, housewives could make a sweet, tangy filling without any citrus or apples. Rhubarb became a kind of fruit substitute, especially in Alaska. After all, many culinary rhubarb varieties are hardy, require minimal care, and thrive in cool climates.