What's Blooming Now - White Snakeroot 10/25/10

White Snakeroot is very happy in a shady location. Be careful when planting it because it is poisonous. After it blooms, the seeds are attached to a fluffy white tail, and they will be dispersed by the wind and reseed readily. Snakeroot got its common name because it was thought for some time that the root cured snakebites.

This is the plant that caused milk sickness in cows. White Snakeroot contains the toxin tremetol which can pass through to humans in the milk and the meat. When the European settlers began settling in the Midwest and southern United States in the 1800s they were unfamiliar with this plant, and thousands died from the disease. Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln's mother, died from the milk sickness. It was decades before the cause of the disease was traced to Snakeroot.