I never saw the flowers even though I make it a point of hiking through this area regularly. Due to the chewed off tops, it is quite possible if I had visited a few days or a week later I may not have seen these plants either. bboy - not sure if you are referring to the plant's odd name or if you think they were eaten by horses, but on that note, while I was looking up info about "horse gentain" it was noted that nobody really knows why it was given this name :-)

Pokeweed: Phytolacca americana. Had one growing in my backyard a year ago. Cut it down. Now there's one outside my back fence. See "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places" by Steve Brill & Evelyn Dean. Check out www.fcps.edu/StratfordLandingES/Ecology/mpages/poison_ivy.htm Try putting in pokeweed in place of poison_ivy. When I just did it the picture didn't come up, but it's a wonderful website to see "Relationships in Nature". If you type less than .../mpages/ and don't put anything after, you get the website, but "File not found."

ooops...wrong forum...I missed the "starting from seed" tag.

duplicate post