Cold hardiness

Heat tolerance

Where this plant fits

Suitable across 45 ecoregions — 45 climate-resilient through 2070. Best matches first.

What it needs

Lifecycle

Pollination

Potato flowers are self-fertile, but pollination is essentially irrelevant to the garden crop: potatoes are grown for their underground tubers and propagated vegetatively from seed potatoes, not from the true botanical seed that flowers produce. Many cultivars flower only sparsely or drop their flowers, and the small green fruits that may follow are toxic and not harvested. The Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder describes the flowers as "not showy."

For people

The tuber is one of the world’s most important food staples, but only the tuber is edible and it should be cooked. The leaves, stems, flowers, and green fruits contain the toxic glycoalkaloid solanine and are not eaten. Per the Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder, tubers exposed to sunlight turn green and develop solanine — green skin or sprouted "eyes" should be cut away or the tuber discarded. Hilling soil over the base during growth prevents this greening.

Climate notes

In the designer

Seasonal interest

Botanical research database

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