Araliaceae

Panax quinquefolius

American ginseng

Mixed Caution CITES Appendix II

Part used: root
Native range: Eastern North America, from Quebec to Georgia
Morphology: A woodland perennial to about half a metre, with whorled five-part leaves and red berries, growing in shaded hardwood forest. Takes several years to reach harvestable size.

What is in it

triterpene saponins ginsenoside Rb1

polysaccharides

Evidence

Limited trial evidence, chiefly small studies on upper respiratory infection frequency and on blood glucose. Not established.

Safety

Broadly as for Asian ginseng, with a milder reported stimulant effect. Blood glucose effects are documented.

Interactions: Reduces the effect of warfarin; May lower blood glucose

Regulatory: Listed on CITES Appendix II. Harvest and export are regulated in the United States and Canada, with state-level season and age limits.

How the traditions classify it

Chinese Xi yang shen — sweet, slightly bitter and cool, in explicit contrast to the warm Asian species. Chinese practice treats the two as different medicines and uses the American one where the warming quality of ren shen would be wrong.

Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.

Historical use

Used by Haudenosaunee, Cherokee and other eastern peoples. Identified as a Panax by the Jesuit Joseph-Francois Lafitau in Quebec in 1716 on the strength of a description of Chinese ginseng, after which an export trade to China began almost immediately and has continued for three centuries.

Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.

Worth knowing

The American ginseng trade is three hundred years old and was, from the beginning, an export industry aimed at China — one of the earliest sustained transatlantic trades in a wild-harvested plant.

The pressure has never eased. Roots take years to reach size, harvesting kills the plant, and wild roots command large multiples of cultivated ones, so poaching from national parks and private forest is a persistent enforcement problem. It is the reason the species sits on CITES Appendix II and why US states run licensed seasons with minimum plant ages.

What is striking is that Chinese practice did not simply absorb it as a cheaper substitute. It classified the American plant as cool where the Asian one is warm, and uses them for different purposes — a tradition meeting a new plant and placing it on its own terms.

Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.