"What's that?" my wife asked, pointing to a plant poking out of my sage, a scarlet-stemmed intruder with oval light green leaves and deep blue, almost black, berries.
Heck if I know. We had gone over to the late-October garden to admire an unexpected tomato. Spherical, bright red, rare enough that I'm surprised I recognized it on sight.
I took a photo — the phone, I discovered, will tell you what a plant is if you press your finger on a photo of its leaves, the "LOOK UP" function. Only it didn't work. Sometimes it doesn't work.
Google Image Search did the trick. "Common pokeweed," a web site called Gardening Know How sniffed. Native Americans used them in medicine and Southerners sometimes bake the fruit into pies, but you have to handle it gingerly: "A native plant that grows in disturbed soils, such as fields and pastures. It's a tenacious grower that can grow up to ten feet (3 m). The plant is hazardous to livestock and all parts of the plant are considered toxic."
"Disturbed soils." I'll have to tuck that one away for when the National Guard hits downstate. Oh, right, they're never going there.
The web site encouraged people who find them to dig them out, getting all the roots, as they come raging back, and produce 48,000 seeds, distributing more pokeweeds.
Have to do that ASAP. Until then, I did some poking myself, and came up with Amy Clampitt's poem, "Vacant Lot with Pokeweed."
"Tufts, follicles, grubstake biennial rosettes," she begins, none too promisingly, "a low- life beach-blond scruff of couch grass."
The poem picks up in the second stanza, observing "weeds do not hesitate," another useful phrase to slip into the literary toolbox.
The third stanza has "magenta-girded bower," also good. In the fourth and last, she compares the fruit to a garnet — not perfect, but not bad — and ends strong, with: "salvage from the season's frittering, the annual wreckage."
It's going to be difficult, from now on, not to refer to my garden as "the annual wreckage." Amy Clampitt, by the way, was born in Iowa, attended Grinnell College, and did not publish her first collection of Poetry until she was 63. She received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992, and used the money for her first major purchase: a neat little gray clapboard house in Lennox, Massachusetts, chosen for its proximity to Edith Wharton's "first real home."
Clampitt died of ovarian cancer two years later, and preserved the home through a writer's residency program — you get to live in the Berkshires with your spouse and children, if you have them, but no pets, for six months, and the Amy Clampitt Fund pays you $4,000, which is not bad for a poet. You have until June 15 ,2026 to apply here. Good luck.
Highly unusual that you found it so far north, Mister S. Blame it on climate change.
ReplyDeletePoke salad is the name for a special preparation for a toxic weed that you can only find throughout the South. While it's not necessarily a common food on restaurant menus, it is a dish borne of Appalachian culinary resilience and tradition.
The dish is so-named because it is made with pokeweed, the pervasive flowering plant native to North America. With a sturdy red stem, this plant can grow as tall as six feet, growing beautiful dark red berries and white flowers. While the flowers and berries are extremely toxic, it's actually the dark, leafy green leaves that are used to make poke salad. These bitter leaves must be ingested properly, usually by boiling at least twice—then cooking over high heat in a tasty oil like bacon fat—to eliminate the toxicity and avoid complications.
The recipe is also known as poke sallet (a French-derived word similar to "salade") and polk salad (which inspired a 1969 Top 40 hit, “Polk Salad Annie”). Since pokeweed is especially prevalent in Southern Appalachia along open fields, roadsides, and the edges of forested areas, the make-do recipe became a type of foraged staple in many rural Southern communities. [Southern Living magazine]
What a team you two make!
ReplyDeleteTo be palatable it must be cooked in bacon fat? You can cook cardboard in bacon fat and it will taste good. I think I'll take a pass on pokeweed.
ReplyDeleteIf there’s room in the garden, consider leaving it, at least till the end of the season. Though pokeweed is not a great food plant for humans, wildlife love this plant that’s wildly native to the eastern half of the country, and the late season berries are a magnet for migrating birds.
ReplyDeleteI've come to rethink my thoughts on fire; specifically those of the Prairie variety.
ReplyDeleteI used to think fire was a really bad thing... but the importance of them seems to be much more clear in recent times. I would bet that pokeweed, not to mention a lot of other invasives like kudzo, would be much easier to control if we did controlled burns.
While i was waiting for the Metra the other day, i was struck about how many weeds were starting to over run the embankment to the rail. There was some pokeweed and a lot of cone flowers from two or three years ago. If once ever year or two Metra had controlled buns i bet things would look a lot better and more natural... which i would love.
but then again, how many square miles of Prairie does the Prairie State still have? spoiler, its not a lot.
We battle pokeweed for the majority of the summer and into the fall. It pops up everywhere and is truly a pain in the neck. Even if you catch it when it’s small (6”-12”) it is just impossible to uproot by pulling it up. It roots deeply and firmly and about the only to eradicate it is to dig it up. Other than that you can hit it with Roundup, though I try to use that stuff as sparingly as possible. And I’ll happily take a pass on ingesting it, whether it be the salad or the bacon fat variety!
ReplyDeleteAre they counting vacant lots? I grew up calling them "prairies."
ReplyDeletetate