Our Spotted Joe-Pye Weed is featured on a beautiful ceramic mug with original painterly art — Spotted Joe-Pye weed found blooming in a shaded woodland edge, one of the most beloved late-summer wildflowers of the eastern meadows, and one with a genuine historical mystery behind her name.
For nearly two hundred years, nobody actually knew who Joe Pye was. Field guides and garden books offered vague, conflicting answers — a wandering healer, somewhere on the eastern seaboard, sometime in the 1600s or 1700s, depending which source you asked.
The mystery wasn't solved until 2017, when botanists Richard Pearce and James Pringle published years of research tracing the name to a real person: Joseph Shauquethqueat, a Mohican sachem who led his community in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century, and who took "Joseph Pye" as his adopted name. He was known for his knowledge of medicinal plants, and this one, used to treat fevers and ease the body's own defenses, eventually carried his name into botany books and gardens for centuries after.
She's as generous to pollinators as she is steeped in history. Butterflies, bees, and moths crowd her dusty-pink blooms through the height of summer, making her one of the most valuable native plants a garden can offer.
Wherever you garden, consider choosing plants native to your region — they ask for less and give the local birds, bees, and butterflies so much more.
A morning ritual worth savoring, rooted in a garden worth tending.
Sturdy white ceramic mug with a colorful interior and handle. 11 oz: 3.79" tall, 3.25" diameter.
Part of the Sacred Garden Collection. Dove & Ink — where faith meets the natural world.
