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Joe-Pye weeds
Joe Pye 5426.JPG
Joe-Pye weed in flower
Monarch&JoePyeWeed 02.jpg
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Eudicots
(unranked): Asterids
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Tribe: Eupatorieae
Genus: Eutrochium
  • Eupatoriadelphus
  • Solidago subgenus Euthamia Nutt.

Eutrochium is a North American genus of herbaceous flowering plants in the sunflower family. They are commonly referred to as Joe-Pye weeds. They are native to the United States and Canada, and have non-dissected foliage and pigmented flowers.

The genus includes all the purple-flowering North American species of the genus Eupatorium as traditionally defined.[1] Eupatorium has recently undergone some revision and has been broken up into smaller genera.[2][3] Eutrochium is the senior synonym of Eupatoriadelphus.[4][5] Eupatorium in the revised sense (about 42 species of white-flowered plants from the temperate Northern hemisphere) is apparently a close relative of Eutrochium. Another difference between Eutrochium and Eupatorium is that the former has mostly whorled leaves and the latter mostly opposite ones.[6][7] Eupatorium and Eutrochium are both placed in the subtribe Eupatoriinae, but South American plants which have sometimes been placed in that subtribe, such as Stomatanthes, seem to belong elsewhere in the tribe Eupatorieae.[3]



Joe Pye (Jopi in the Native tongue), an Indian healer from New England, used E. purpureum to treat a variety of ailments, which led to the name Joe-Pye weed for these plants.[10] Folklore says that Joe Pye used this plant to cure fevers. Folklore also states that American colonists used this plant to treat typhus outbreaks.[11] The author Hemmerly writes that the Indians used Joe Pye Weed in the treatment of kidney stones and other urinary tract ailments.[12]

Bumblebee pollinating Joe-Pye weed
Whorled leaves of a Joe Pye Weed. Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina, September 2012


  6. ^ 393. Eutrochium Rafinesque, Flora of North America
  7. ^ 392. Eupatorium Linnaeus, Flora of North America
  8. ^ The Plant List, search for Eutrochium
  9. ^ [1]
  12. ^ Hemmerly, T. E. (2000). Appalachian Wildflowers. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.