Pōpolo

Pōpolo

Pōpolo

Names

  • ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: Pōpolo
  • English: Glossy nightshade
  • Scientific: Solanum americanum

Species Information

This glossy nightshade is an annual or short-lived perennial herb that spreads wide.  It can grow to about 4 ft.  The leaves are spirally arranged, almost opposite.  The flowers are white or flushed purpole with a yellow-green star.  The fruit is a berry that goes from green to purplish-black at maturity and has many seeds (Edmonds and Chweya, 1997).

The edible fruits could be used for a blackish-purple dye (Krauss, 1993).  For sore muscles, tendons, and joints, the juice from the leaves was sometimes applied to an area and then sunned (Abbott, 1992).  This plant was used in many medicinal mixtures, such as one for sore throat where the leaves were pounded together with hinaʻalo bark, ʻakaʻakai bulbs, and salt.  Water was added to the mixture and then strained through ʻahuʻawa then gargled twice a day (Chun, 1994).

Distribution

S. americanum is widespread throughout the tropics and subtropics, rare casual in southern Europe, and thought to be native in South America (Edmonds and Chweya, 1997).

Habitat

S. americanum occurs in a wide variety of habitats, including open sites, coastal forest, wet forest, subapline woodland, pasture, and disturbed roadsides to about 7800 ft (Wagner et al., 1990).

Photos

Pōpolo

Joan Simon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

References & Additional Resources

  • Abbott, Isabella Aiona. Lā’au Hawai’i : Traditional Hawaiian Uses of Plants. Bishop Museum Press, 1992.
  • Chun, Malcolm Naea. Native Hawaiian Medicines; First People’s Productions,1994.
  • Edmonds, J. M. and Chweya, J. A.  International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), 1997.
  • Krauss, Beatrice H. Plants in Hawaiian Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
  • Wagner, Warren L., Derral R. Herbst, and S. H. Sohmer.  Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai’i. University of Hawaii Press, 1990.