"Flowering Spurge, Flat-topped Spurge, Milk Purslane, Milkweed, Snake Milk, Tramp's Spurge, White-flowered Milkweed, Wild Hippo"

Mostlike after Euphorbus, a physician to King Juba of Namidia and from the Latin corollata, meaning "with corollas".

Favors dry soils in open clearings, old pastures and roadsides throughout the Tallgrass Region. Blooms from June to October. Can grow to three feet and bears small, white flowers with five egg-shaped petal-like bracts (what we see as a flower are these bracts, not a true flower; the true flower is set in the cup formed by the bracts and is a green flower 1/12 of an inch long.

Native Americans used Flowering Spurge with a combination of other plant juices to dissolve warts and other growths on the skin. Combined with other plants, it served the Meskwaki as a laxative and cathartic and as a treatment for rheumatism and pinworms. The powdered bark was used almost across the continent as a purgative. The powdered root bark is very powerful and prone to overdose, but around the turn of the century, it enjoyed widespread use as an emetic, a diaphoretic, an expectorant and an epistatic. Again, despite it's propensity to irratating and potentially poisonous side effects, it was at one time considered the best remedy for dropsy. The common name "Spurge" comes from the Latin expurgate, meaning "to purge".

 

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