Field Notes—

The Riddles Of The Pokeweed

By Curtiss Clark

If birds ruled the world, we would all be required to drop what we are doing next week to participate in a prolonged late-summer giddy revel celebrating the pokeberry. There would be festivals, competitions, singing, and where the berries have fermented, some drunkenness and pushing and shoving. We would be stained purple by our gluttony and insatiable thirst, and we would be unrepentant — but only if we were birds.

We are humans. A Pokeberry Fest would kill us.

The American pokeweed (phytolacca americana) is a strange plant, rising quickly in the summer heat along fencerows, on scrap land, and in the suddenly sunny forest openings where great trees have fallen. In the fullness of the season it stands, human-sized, with blood-red stems and branches looking like a gangly vascular system left behind by departed legs and arms, rooted against its wish to catch up by a long and tenacious taproot. It is fleshed out by alternating leaves on lanky leaf stems and topped off with a jester’s cockade of elongated racemes that, oddly, bear flowers and berries simultaneously. It is full of riddles.

The plant is poisonous from its root to its bulging purple berries, and yet birds gorge themselves on the fruit with impunity. Other animals tend not to partake because of the plant’s bitter taste, but farmers, taking no chances, are quick to uproot pokeweed from their pastures to protect their livestock.

For humans, pokeweed is a violent emetic, and in serious cases of pokeweed poisoning, the vomiting is followed by diarrhea, spasms, and sometimes convulsions and death. Yet in southern states, poke “salet” (salad) greens were once a staple of traditional folk cooking. (Remember Elvis Presley’s famous version of Tony Joe White’s “Poke Salad Annie”?) Poke salet is made from the young leaves of the plant, cut as soon as they emerge from the ground, boiled three times to purge the toxins, and eaten like spinach.

Visiting Europeans developed a taste for this native American vegetable green and took the plant home with them, making the pokeweed one of the few invasive plants to make the transatlantic trip from west to east.

Eating a single pokeberry daily was also a southern folk remedy for arthritis. Yet, health professionals at poison control centers in the modern south now advise the public not to eat any foods made from pokeweed.

Other health professionals, however, are interested in pokeweeds and not simply as a folk remedy. Over the past several years, researchers have been studying the DNA of pokeweed antiviral protein (PAP), which they have extracted from the plant. PAP has properties that inhibit HIV, and the goal of the research is to genetically re-engineer PAP for new therapies against drug-resistant strains of the virus. Of all the pokeweed’s riddles, this may be the toughest and the most rewarding to solve.

Year after year, the pokeweed tantalizes us from the margins of our cultivated world. One of these jesters stands guard over the compost bin in our backyard. A community of them has claimed the steep and rocky eastern flank of The Bee’s parking lot near the fire hydrant. From these and millions of other forgotten places, from Maine to Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, they are casting protective spells upon the birds so they will eat their fill and carry their precious purple-seeded payload across the landscape, projecting pokeweed power indiscriminately on car windshields, sun-baked awnings, streets and sidewalks until new and unlikely venues are secured for future giddy revels in the waning days of summers to come.

Before too long, the frosts of fall will buckle the plants at their elbows and knees, and winter storms will shred them to litter. But deep in the poisonous protection of their carrot-shaped roots, the riddles of the pokeweed will live on.