The Jerusalem artichoke is being rediscovered, turning up packed in fancy bags labeled Sunchokes on supermarket shelves. They're tasty and among the easiest vegetables to grow.

How’s this for a misnomer: The Jerusalem artichoke is neither an artichoke, nor is it from Jerusalem.

The root vegetable was one of the first native American plants to be carried across the Atlantic. This New World food was greeted with enthusiasm by Europeans but lost favor after another native vegetable, the potato, was introduced.

Now Jerusalem artichokes are being rediscovered, turning up packed in fancy bags labeled “Sunchokes” on supermarket shelves. The root vegetables are tasty raw, with flavor and texture similar to water chestnuts. Cooked, the flesh becomes smooth, with a mild, nutty flavor.

They’re also among the easiest vegetables to grow. They’re hardy and perennial. Stick a tuber in the ground in a sunny spot, and in a year you’ll have a clump of tubers. In rows, plant them a foot apart. And forget about pest problems.

Tuber colors range from white to red to purple. Of the named varieties, Stampede is early-ripening, and French Mammoth White is high-yielding. The tubers are knobby but have thin skins so only need to be scrubbed, not peeled. And Gold Nugget, Fuseau and American (Improved Mammoth French) come to the rescue with smoother tubers.

Jerusalem artichokes would be worth growing just for their beauty. They bloom in autumn, and in the wild their yellow heads – looking like miniature sunflowers – occasionally stare out from the sunny edges of farm fields and along roadsides. Those blossoms also make excellent cut flowers.

Harvest sunchokes anytime after the foliage begins to die in autumn. Tubers are best harvested as needed, because they don’t keep long out of the ground. To keep the crop perennial, leave some in the ground – but you’ll never find every last piece of every last tuber in a clump anyway.

If Jerusalem artichokes are beginning to sound weedy, yes, they have picked up that reputation. Although they multiply underground, and every piece of tuber can grow into a new plant, Jerusalem artichokes rarely become weedy in gardens that are not weedy anyway. They have nothing of the weed potential of a patch of other garden plants such as mint, horseradish or lemon balm.

The only real problem? The name. We might as well drop the “artichoke.” That part of the name came from what Samuel Champlain thought the tubers tasted like when he and his men shared them with some Cape Cod Indians in the 1600s.

The original Italian name was girasole, which means “turning to the sun” but was anglicized to “Jerusalem.” Or we could try the translation of the original name, “sun root.”

Surely that’s more appealing than “sunchoke.”