A tall, smooth, branching plant with red stems and juicy, dark purple berries, pokeweed is both toxic and a traditional edible potherb called poke salat. It is common statewide.
- The young leaves are edible for people, but only if cooked properly to remove most of the toxins.
- The berries are toxic (to humans) if eaten.
- Some people develop a rash after handling the plants.
Pokeweed is a tall, smooth, branching perennial with red stems and juicy, dark purple berries.
The stems are smooth, often reddish- or purplish-tinged.
The flowers are in terminal and lateral racemes, minute, somewhat bell-shaped, with 5 greenish-white sepals suffused with pink. There are no petals. There are 10 protruding stamens. There is 1 pistil with 10 carpels (chambers) in a ring; each carpel has its own style, so the single pistil in each flower usually has 10 styles. (The 10 carpels are most evident once the berry has matured and dried.)
Blooms May–October.
The leaves are many, alternate, smooth, oblong-lanceolate, to 1 foot long, on petioles.
The fruit is in elongated clusters of dark purple, juicy, berries containing 10 oval black seeds.
Height: to 10 feet.
Statewide.
Habitat and Conservation
Common in disturbed soils and waste places, farmyards, fencerows, fields, and rights-of-way, and banks of waterways, ponds, lakes, bases and ledges of bluffs, and edges of bottomland and moist upland forests.
Pokeweed's large size, handsome, smooth, purple-tinged stems, stout taproot, and long-lasting fertility of the seeds make this a familiar, hardy weed.
It is native to the eastern United States but has been introduced west to California and Oregon and to the Old World.
Status
Native Missouri nonwoody plant.
Often considered an agricultural and garden weed. This plant is both toxic and edible. Proper harvesting and cooking are important with this plant.
The toxins in pokeweed are not completely understood. All parts should be considered poisonous to people and livestock. Cooking reduces the toxicity.
Some people develop a rash after handling the plants.
Human Connections
This plant is both toxic and edible.
All parts are toxic, but young shoots and leaves, after thorough cooking in at least two changes of water, are eaten by many in a dish traditionally called poke salat.
- Like many other words in Ozark dialect, salat goes back to Elizabethan English. Shakespeare used the word: “I can eat grass, or pick a sallet” (Henry VI, Part 2, act 4, sc. 10).
The berries have been used as ink, as a coloring for food and beverages, and as a dye in handcrafts.
Scientists are studying the plant for possible antiviral and antitumor medicines.
For a "weed," pokeweed can be strikingly handsome.
The genus name, Phytolacca, is from phyto (plant) and lacca (referring to the bright red substance produced by lac insects).
Ecosystem Connections
The berries are eaten by birds, which seem to be immune to the toxins in the fruits and eat the berries with gusto.
- Some of the birds that commonly eat berries, including poke berries, are the northern mockingbird, gray catbird, brown thrasher, northern cardinal, and cedar waxwing.
- The bright red, late-season stems of pokeweed plants are thought to be how the plants signal to birds that the berries are ripe.
Mammals that are reported to eat poke berries include mice, raccoons, opossums, foxes, and even black bears.
- Birds and mammals that consume the berries later disperse the undigested seeds in their droppings.
- The seeds can survive in the soil for more than 40 years.
Flower flies (syrphids) and sweat bees (halictids) visit the flowers for pollen, nectar, or both.
Pokeweed is mostly self-pollinated, with pollen grains passed from anthers to styles in the flower buds.
Pokeweed is an aggressive and efficient colonizer of disturbed sites.
This is the only member of the pokeweed family in Missouri.
Botanists, using gene sequencing data, are debating how big the pokeweed family is. It could contain between 30 and 120 species worldwide, depending on how botanists organize the family.
- Regardless of how the family is organized, most pokeweed species live in tropical and subtropical regions.
- The name of our species, americana, is a sign that it is the most widespread member of genus Phytolacca in North America.
- A few other species in genus Phytolacca occur in the United States, mainly in the west, where they have been introduced from Mexico or Central America.
- One species, the Hawai'i pokeweed, is endemic to (exclusively found in) Hawaii.
