Seneca root
Polygala senega
Also called Seneca snakeroot
We do not have a Blackfoot or Cree name for this one yet. Tell us the name and we will add it, with your word on where it comes from.
A small prairie plant with a twisted, knotty root that smells faintly of wintergreen. It was dug and traded in enormous quantity out of the prairies for a century, and it has not recovered everywhere.
Learn and harvest this one only alongside a knowledge keeper.
Take care
- Strong. Overdoing it causes vomiting. Not in pregnancy.
- Heavily depleted by commercial harvest. Please do not dig it.
How to know it
- Height
- Ankle high, several slender stems rising together from one crown.
- Leaves
- Narrow, alternate, stalkless, pointed.
- Flowers
- A short dense spike of small greenish-white flowers at the top of the stem.
- Root
- A twisted knotty crown with a distinct ridge running down one side, smelling faintly of wintergreen when scratched.
The country it grows in
- Open prairie
- Aspen parkland
Landscape types only. We do not publish where a patch is, and we are not going to.
When it is ready
- Roots August to September
Right now it is July. Nothing on this plant is in season.
What it is used for
- Breathing and colds
A well-documented cough and chest medicine, and for a long time one of the few prairie plants traded into the commercial drug market.
We are not putting this online
This entry withholds preparation, dosing. Seneca root is potent, easy to overdo, and thin on the ground after a century of commercial digging. Listing it so it can be recognised is useful; publishing a recipe for it is not.
Where to ask instead: Speak with a knowledge keeper before gathering or using this one.
Protocol
Ask the plant first, and offer something before you take anything. Tobacco is what is most often offered here. Say who you are, and say what the medicine is for.
Harvest the mature plants and leave the small ones to grow. Never take the first plant you find, and never take all of them.
Take only what you will actually use. Medicine picked and then left to rot in a bag was taken for nothing.
Leave the ground as you found it. Put back any dirt you dug up, and return any plant material you do not use to the earth.
Do not gather beside roads, highways or trails, where the plants take up whatever has been sprayed or spilled there.
If you are not certain what a plant is, do not pick it and do not put it in your mouth. Ask someone. Being wrong in the field is how people get hurt.
This one was dug commercially almost to exhaustion in living memory. In most places the right answer is to learn it, and leave it in the ground.