Here's your pokeweed (pic from last summer) -- over 6 ft tall.

Ken, I remember that! It was quite the phenomenon, wasn't it? It was so common that we could ID the plant without seeing a picture or reading any kind of a description. Just the title, "What is this plant?" would be enough, lol.

Has the advent of more reliable plant ID apps led to the demise of such postings?

many peeps simply dont seem to get out in the yard.. until the 4th of july ... and i suspect.. this is when the posts start ..

and by that time the plants are getting pretty large .. so they are noticeable .....

and then all the berry eaters want to eat the pretty grape like seeds.. and good luck with that ...

we will see in a few weeks ...

ken

Viburnum, yeah, I heresay they grow 'em big in KY. :) The annual European lettuce here grows 10-15 ft high by end of summer near my stream, if they don't get blown over.

This is a hilarious thread.

Plant ID requests seem to be way down on the 2 forum sites I use. No idea what's going on with other sites/social media. I don't get involved in that stuff. But I have noticed people coming to the forums to provide IDs from aps, not even checking to see if the ap was correct. Often the aps are not correct, so there are a heckuva lot of people walking around with a heckuva lot of wrong plant IDs.

^^^ I read somewhere that the accuracy of plant ID apps hovers only around 50%. Folks seem more inclined to believe in any kind of technology when it is just as fallible as the skill and experience of the programmers/app developers creating it.

Ken, I'm awfully glad that you're back ;)

I love pokeweed along the side of the road. I use the giant leaves, 8" plus wide x 20"plus long to make leaf stepping stones. Big enough for my feet but a great size to walk in between plants.

I think some people are just fine with wrong IDs, they just want a name and then drift off to the next thing they can ask the internet about.

A friend sent me a picture of the Chinese pokeweed (P. polyandra) from a garden she was visiting and it's a nice thing, but I think our common pokeweed is plenty for me.

Of course any plant has named forms because gardeners are what they are... I like 'Sunny Side Up' for its yellow foliage. Still a weed but if anyone asks I just tell them it's a native plant and they're more impressed.

if you take a weed.. and select a pretty piece.. and name it... making it a cultivar... is it still a weed ... lol .... if peeps pay a lot of money for it ...

you really need to applaud some marketing .. lol

Some kids came in my yard one time and asked if they could eat the blackberries. They were pokeweed! I told them never to eat stuff without being sure what it is. At least they asked. Hopefully they now know they know things that just ain't so.

Haha - maybe everyone's been educated about pokeweed now, thanks to this forum 😄

Nope, Carol I'm sure there's a sucker born every minute. It's just that forum usage is WAY way way down. I agree with the earlier sentiments about the apps. I tested two years ago (admittedly that was an age ago) and found so many toxic plants in my garden misidentified, for instance hellebores were blackberries.

That's dangerous.

At least Hellebores don’t produce berries. A couple of years ago I intervened when I saw a woman gathering Privet berries. Her phone had told her they were Elder and she was planning to make a ’winter tonic’ for her child.

Yikes!

Know-it-all phone!