Panax ginseng

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This article is about the plant species. For the root and its uses, see Ginseng. For another species that is also called "Chinese ginseng", see Panax notoginseng.

Panax ginseng
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
(unranked):	Asterids
Order:	Apiales
Family:	Araliaceae
Genus:	Panax
Species:	Panax ginseng
Synonyms
Aralia ginseng Baill. Panax verus Oken[1]

Panax ginseng, the ginseng,^[2] also known as Asian ginseng,^[2][3] Chinese ginseng,^[2][3] or Korean ginseng,^[2][3][4] is a species of plant whose root is the original source of ginseng. It is a perennial plant that grows in the mountains of East Asia.

Names

Panax ginseng is called Rénshēn (人蔘 or 人参 or 人參; lit. 'ginseng') in Chinese, Insam (인삼; 人蔘) in Korean and Ninjin (人参) in Japanese.

Folk medicine

Ginseng is used as an herb in folk medicine.^[3]

Distribution

Panax ginseng is native to mountainous regions of Russian Far East (Outer Manchuria), Northeast China, and the Korean Peninsula.^[2] It is a protected plant in Russia and China, and most commercial ginseng is now sourced from plants cultivated in China, Korea and Russia. The plant is a slow-growing perennial and the roots are usually harvested when the plants are five or six years old.^[5]

Cultivation

Panax ginseng is one of the most commonly cultivated ginseng species, along with P. notoginseng (grown naturally in China), P. ginseng (grown naturally in China, North Korea and South Korea), and P. quinquefolius.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.