The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Argentina pacifica
Also called Argentine, Pacific silverweed
Coastal Silverweed (Argentina pacifica) is a low perennial, about 15 cm tall, with silvery-undersided pinnate leaves and yellow flowers, native to the Pacific coast of North America. It spreads fast in moist, sunny, saline or estuarine ground and is grown mainly as a ground cover or for its edible roots.
Argentina pacifica, sometimes called pacific silverweed, silverweed cinquefoil, or simply silverweed, is a low-growing perennial plant with pinnate leaves and yellow flowers. The edible roots were valued by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and Canada.
Pacific silverweed spreads very quickly in moist areas. Preferring salt marshes, river estuaries and shorelines, they are often seen growing alongside springbank clover. They need sun and regular water.
Pacific silverweed is important in Pacific Northwest coastal indigenous cultures of North America and Canada. These Indigenous people dig for its edible roots. As an important vegetable, families maintained rights to access patches through potlatch. New plants can grow from small root fragments, and with some attention families could guarantee patches persisted for generations, perhaps over thousands of years. Northwest Coast peoples used to dig them in spring with yew-wood shovels before pit-cooking them or boiling them with eulachon grease. Cooked roots have a slightly bitter sweet-potato flavour. Northwest Coast peoples also washed them or mashed them into cakes and dried them for winter.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Argentina pacifica by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
