Pokeweed, poisonous but Elvis sang about it, leaves a purple stain

One day last week before I could leave with my car I had to clean a purplish wash off its front window. Right now it's not uncommon to find this stain at many places because there are lots of pokeweed plants covered with purple/black berries in the fields and at wild places in the yard.

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is a native perennial plant that can get as big as 10 feet tall. It has reddish/purple stems and at this time of the year it's covered with berries whose stain is hard to remove from clothing.

If you like birds then you probably let pokeweed grow because all of the birds that eat berries seek it out. But if you just want to get rid of it you'll have a hard time. It develops a big, wide root system that's almost impossible to remove.

All parts of pokeweed are poisonous to humans, but for years its young 6-inch or so stems that break ground in the spring have been eaten by people, primarily in the Southern part of the country.

I always wonder how they came to know that these shoots are edible but only if you first boil them three times, throwing away the water after each boiling. Reportedly after they're cooked they taste like asparagus or spinach.

But please don't take a chance on eating them unless you're with someone who's an expert on this plant. You could end up with a bad stomachache or worse.

Perhaps the early colonists learned how to cook pokeweed from the Indians, in whose culture the word poke meant blood. In any case, both the colonists and the Indians used the berry juice to make dyes and paint, and the colonists used it to make ink.

In 1969 cooked pokeweed shoots were made famous in a song called "Polk Salad Annie" about a poor Southern girl gathering them for food. It was written and sung by Tony Joe White but became very famous when Elvis Presley began singing it.

One of the most interesting sidebars that I read about this plant involves Dolly Parton. Apparently in her biography, which I haven't read, she said that as a teenager her parents forbade her to wear makeup so she put pokeweed berry juice on her lips to brighten them.

Currently there are berries on lots of plants because, like walnuts and chestnuts, they're what they use to reproduce. And some of the most attractive berries are the red and yellow ones of Asiatic bittersweet .

This alien plant is all over the place, having escaped cultivation years ago. Its orange husks split open to reveal a red berry inside, so they're attractive and fit right in with fall and Halloween decorations.

Another plant now getting covered with attractive berries that birds eat and spread around is triangle vine (Persicaria perfoliata) , which is also called mile-a-minute vine. But be careful if you want to put its pretty blue berries in decorations because its common name is Asiatic Tear Thumb.

This invasive alien from Eastern Asia is called tear thumb for a good reason. If you grab its stems with bare hands you'll quickly and painfully find out that it has hooked barbs on them.