Still Here: Pokeweed is for the birds

If colors could have voices, fuchsia’s would be loud. The loud voice of the fuchsia racemes of a pokeweed this time of year, when they are decked in midnight-purple fruits, says one thing to humans and another to birds. To a bird, the bright racemes are a marquee: “Hey! Over here! Eat me and spread my seeds!” To humans it’s a warning, the same warning that the brightness of poison dart frogs and Amanita muscaria mushrooms declares: “Do NOT eat me, I will be the death of you.”

It’s a little confusing to us humans for a couple reasons. The fruits of pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, do look like Dionysus’ first rough draft of grapes. In the end he ditched the idea of putting them on an herbaceous perennial that grows like a small tree and opted to put grapes on woody vines, made the fruits bigger and bunchier, and ditched the fuchsia. Is that what makes them edible?

The second reason is that the shoots and leaves of pokeweed are actually edible for a short amount of time when they are first emerging in the spring, and only if prepared properly. Later in the season the whole plant is poisonous. Pokeweed was often eaten as one would eat spinach, and it is said to have the same flavor. People knew how to identify it and prepare it and up until 2000 you could even buy canned pokeweed, which makes me wonder if once upon a time there were pokeweed farms or if people were paid to forage the shoots and leaves in the spring.

From the tender emerging shoots, a mature pokeweed can grow into 10 feet of toxicity by the end of the season. Often the whole plant is supported by one stalk, which also turns shades of fuchsia, as do its branching stems covered in spade-shaped leaves. The leaves, which can be as short as three inches and as long as a foot, arch downward, sometimes giving the plant an umbrella-like form. From these branches the dangling racemes emerge, proffering small white blossoms around midsummer. It will continue to bloom even as the season’s earlier blossoms turn to fruit. At the end of the season the ground seems to suck all the color out of the plant and it becomes pale and desiccated, but still standing, although stooped under the weight of any leftover fruits it may be holding. Eventually, after enough pounding rain and heavy snowfall, the structure will bow to the ground and die back, while the plant will resurrect from its perennial root in spring.

The unripe fruits are green and then turn plump and almost black. Songbirds eat these berries throughout the season and into winter, when the fruit is dried and almost black and its skin is taut around the 10 seeds it contains. If you are a car owner wondering why your vehicle is covered in purple bird poop, even in the dead of winter, know at least that some birds have been fed by pokeweed.

Some of those birds turned into accidental gardeners and planted a couple of pokeweed seeds in the container garden behind my building. They laid low for most of the summer and then made themselves known in early September when my family and I came back from a vacation.

While pokeweed berries have been tinting bird poop for eons, they have also been tinting people’s garments and have been used as a dye by Indigenous peoples and European colonizers. In fact, one of its common names is inkberry. Another is pigeon berry.

I don’t remember the first time I encountered pokeweed, but I do remember being very excited to find it growing in Sunset Park near the 41st Street and Seventh Avenue entrance and in the tree beds of the black cherry trees nearby, where it created a thick, thriving understory. The plants growing behind my building can probably trace their lineage to these plants, which were left to their own devices for many years, feeding the birds and minding their business until this year, when they were pulled, along with the jewelweed, another gem of a native plant that was growing nearby, erasing a habitat for Brooklyn’s wildlife. In contrast, if you go to Prospect Park you will see pokeweed growing along the sidewalks and congregating under trees, tantalizing the birds and bees with their fruits and flowers. Humans get to marvel at those impossibly fuchsia racemes and wish they could find a dress in such a color.