Look to the rough edges
Most folks know American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) by its colloquial name — poke sallet. If you grew up around any semi-feral areas, from clearcuts and hayfields to empty city lots, you probably saw American pokeweed growing in those forgotten places.
It’s a North American native found throughout the continent and tenacious in its existence. You can’t really kill off pokeweed, you can only hope to contain it and barely at that. The brittle roots run deep and any attempt to pull it up will lead to a fractured root still in the ground and, shortly, a brand new pokeweed shoot. Each plant can produce up to 50,000 seeds in its lifetime with seed viability lasting up to forty years. So even if you’re one of those delusional types with a dominion-over-nature complex and possessed of the audacity to think you’ve obliterated it from you’re property, you have done no such thing. It’ll be back if not now then after you’re dead. You can’t outlast pokeweed.
Since it’s a native, pokeweed’s life is intertwined with its environment as part of a tight community. The tender shoots and deep purple berries are favored foods of deer, birds of various species, raccoons, and all sorts of other wildlife. Seeds passing through a bird’s digestive tract is actually one of pokeweed’s most successful strategies for colonizing new areas. Aided by air drops, pokeweed is one of the first flora to populate disturbed land as a “pioneer plant,” setting up shop and setting the stage for other plants and animals to move in as the slow march of succession leads from clearing to hardwood forest.
American pokeweed can also kill you. Every part of the plant is toxic with the roots being the most formidable and the berries the least. But, like I said, wildlife eat it regularly. Deer gobble the berries like I gobble popcorn. How can that be? Curiously, humans and livestock — animals not native to North America — are the creatures most affected by its poison. Seems like there’s a lesson somewhere in that fact, or at least some powerfully poetic truth.
American pokeweed is a rebel subversive of the American wilderness, untamable and pagan to its green and purple core. In a human-dominated world hellbent on progress, it’s an agent of wild reclamation. So, of course, striking beauty and admirable grit aside it is — like so many other native “weeds” — often despised.
Despite its modern bad press, pokeweed has long been intertwined with humans of North America. Indigenous people used the plant for myriad purposes: The berries were used to make paint, the plant’s toxicity was harnessed for medicinal use, and, in its early spring emergence, American pokeweed is fine eating when cooked carefully.
All that utility and legend carried over to rural Euro-American culture, and it’s still firmly embedded in American rural culture to this day. “Poke sallet” was and still is found on rural tables from time to time in the spring. Free and growing anywhere with an open patch of dirt, American pokeweed often found its way to the plate of many who found themselves with a growling stomach and empty pockets. It was likely a lifeline from nature, along with wild meat, persimmons, morels, and a host of other foods available to those willing to look. Pokeweed thrives on the periphery of civilization as a contradiction. Nourishing yet also deadly, it’s a reminder of our oft-forgotten connection to the land and our own wild roots reaching back not so long ago.
All of these characteristics make American pokeweed a near-perfect symbol for rural folks in America, a culture perpetually locked in the pioneer mindset. This understanding in itself should explain a lot of things about said culture. Look to the rough edges, where wild lands touch farm fields. That’s where you’ll find rural people. That’s also where you’ll find American pokeweed.
The plant’s qualities and metaphorical value also led to me deciding to use its name on this site, and I hope that you, the reader, see those attributes in my essays and storytelling. My aim is to look thoughtfully at the connection between people and place, to take note of how the land molds attitudes and worldviews. I want to explore all of this rich and often confounding culture with a combination of gritty sincerity, pretty writing, and clearheaded understanding. And I hope that you can let me know how I’m doing in regards to those goals. Actually, that feeling of community, of American Pokeweed acting as a conduit for conversation is a big reason why I created it.
For now, this site has three categories (I think… bear with me as I figure out all the bells and whistles on Substack). “American Pokeweed” — the category is part exploration, explanation, fond rumination, and often curmudgeonly critique of the culture I come from. Sometimes I’ll write about the glories of fried squirrel and okra. Sometimes I’ll dig into said culture’s effect on society and politics — guns, baby Jesus, mullets, rebel flags, and so much more — across the nation hoping to bring understanding both to those within and without.
Category two is “Circles, Songs, and Seasons.” It’ll feature prose about the wild things (and my interactions with them) who live in the backyard, the sprawling wilderness areas within a short drive of my home, and all places in between. Because the wild is not “out there.” It’s everywhere. Rural culture is tightly tethered to the wild in solidly utilitarian ways. But there is also a vestigial connection rarely discussed or explored nowadays, the shadow of ancestral cultures with blurred lines between the practical day-to-day and the divine. This sweetest of spots is where a lot of my nature essays reside.
Number three is “The Philosophical Hillbilly.” This is a journal of my thoughts not directly related to rural culture or interactions with the natural world. There’s really no telling what you might find there so reader beware.
For my longtime readers (I think there might be a dozen or so), you will see some recycled work on here presented as “new-to-them” for followers just coming on board. This content will be free to all subscribers. For paid subscribers, there will be at least one original item every month — fresh from my fingertips, though, it will have been chewed on obsessively prior to publication. My muses move in strange and confounding ways, and they often take lengthy spells between visits. However, my professional accountability to you guarantees at least one per month, muses be damned. But I suspect that from time to time there will be multiples.
So here’s the first post, and here’s also a raised Mason jar to coming conversations about life along the rough edges.