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.
Phytolacca americana
Also called American Nightshade, Cancer Jalap, Coakum, Garget, Inkberry, Pigeon Berry, Pocan Bush
American pokeweed is a large, native herbaceous perennial that grows 1 to 3 m tall from a thick white taproot. It is a poisonous wild plant grown mainly for songbirds and wildlife, and it is rarely cultivated as a garden plant.
Phytolacca americana, also known as American pokeweed, pokeweed, polk salad, poke sallet, pokeberry, dragonberries, pigeonberry weed, and inkberry, is a poisonous, herbaceous, perennial plant in the pokeweed family Phytolaccaceae. This pokeweed grows 1 to 3 metres (4 to 10 ft). It has simple leaves on green to red or purplish stems and a large, white taproot. The flowers are green to white, followed by berries, which ripen through red to purple to almost black and are a food source for songbirds such as gray catbird, northern mockingbird, northern cardinal, and brown thrasher, as well as other birds and some small nonavian animals (i.e., for species that are unaffected by its mammalian toxins).
Pokeweed is native to eastern North America, the Midwest, and the South, with more scattered populations in the Far West, where it was introduced.
All parts of the plant can be toxic and pose risks to the health of all mammals, including humans. Toxins are found in highest concentration in the rootstock, then leaves and stems, then the ripe fruit. The plant generally gets more toxic with maturity, with the exception of the berries, which are dangerous even while green.
Children may be attracted by clusters of berries. Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) notes:
Pokeweed is native to eastern North America, the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast of the US. It is an introduced weed in Japan.
Indian Pokeweed · Belhambra · Pokeweed · Phytolacca dodecandra
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Phytolacca americana 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.
