Across Appalachia, September marks the start of ginseng season, when thousands of people roam the hills searching for hard-to-reach patches of this highly prized plant. Many people know ginseng as an ...

Emily Cataneo is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has been published in Slate, NPR, the Boston Globe, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications. This story originally featured on Undark.

How can closely related plant species occur on two continents, thousands of miles apart? This distribution pattern is known as disjunction, and it’s a particular area of interest for Dr. Jun Wen, an ...

This article originally appeared on Undark. Iris Gao keeps a ginseng root in her office. It’s fixed on black velvet with three other bleached-brown specimens, all of them twisty and otherworldly and ...

With poachers cashing in on the Chinese appetite for American ginseng, growers are arming up. Chinese demand for wild American ginseng—believed to help with everything from fatigue and depression to ...