A 60-day pot experiment was carried out using di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) as a typical organic pollutant phthalic ester and cowpea (Vigna sinensis) as the host plant to determine the effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal inoculation on plant growth and degradation of DEHP in two contaminated soils, a yellow-brown soil and a red soil. The air-dried soils were uniformly sprayed with different concentrations of DEHP, inoculated or left uninoculated with an arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungus, and planted with cowpea seeds. After 60 days the positive impact of AM inoculation on the growth of cowpea was more pronounced in the red soil than in the yellow-brown soil, with significantly higher (P ＜ 0.01)mycorrhizal colonization rate, shoot dry weight and total P content in shoot tissues for the red soil. Both in the yellowbrown and red soils, AM inoculation significantly (P ＜ 0.01) reduced shoot DEHP content, implying that AM inoculation could inhibit the uptake and translocation of DEHP from roots to the aboveground parts. However, with AM inoculation no positive contribution to the degradation of DEHP was found.