Pennsylvania Game News - June 2011 - 54

Its single stalk holds an umbel of fragrant, white flowers, often dotted with purple or green. Every year I find 12 or more plants clustered at the base of an oak tree above our hollow road, but only one or two flower. Another spot beside our stream produces five plants and sometimes as many as three of those plants flower. In the deepest part of the hollow above the stream, single plants often flourish and flower. A member of the lily family, white clintonia is also called speckled wood lily and white bead lily, the latter name because its cluster of black berries looks like beads. This elegant plant lights up the dark forest and is one of my favorite wildflowers. Jack-in-the-pulpit (arisaema triphyllum), like white clintonia, is spreading every year along our hollow road and beside our stream. It, too, sends out more of its leaves than its flowers, because it takes three or more years to produce a flower. Each leaf has three leaflets, hence its species’ name triphyllum, and looks much like a trillium leaf. It is famous for its sex change performances, called “sequential hermaphroditism” by botanists, meaning the plant can be male, female or both, depending on its environment the previous year. Those with two large sets of leaves are female and should probably be called jill-in-the-pulpit. The smaller plants are males. But jack-in-the-pulpit depends more on asexual reproduction by underground corm, a bulb-like stem that forms buds which produce new plants. Jack-in-the-pulpit has even more nicknames than pink lady’s-slipper, to whit, brown dragon, Indian jack, wood pulpit, little pulpit, starchwort, cuckoo flower, devil’s ear, dragonroot, memory root, Indian turnip, pepper turnip, marsh pepper and Indian almond. The plant is poisonous because it contains calcium oxalate crystals, but the corm, if properly dried and cooked, can be used as a root vegetable, thus the turnip names. It was also an Indian medicinal for treating sore eyes, rheumatism, bronchitis and snakebite.
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Its most intriguing nicknames, though, refer to its amazing shape — the pulpit or hood-like spathe, a light green, veined with a deeper tint, or stained with purple — arched over the jack or club-shaped spadix. At the base of the spadix grow the tiny, unisexual flowers. This unique wildflower has even inspired a long poem by Clara Smith that begins, “Jack-in-thepulpit/ Preaches today/ Under the green trees/ Just over the way.” The preacher even moralizes, rebuking the “White Indian pipes/ On the green mosses lie!/ Who has been smoking/ Profanely so nigh?” I don’t believe any of our jack-in-thepulpits grow close to our Indian pipes. They flourish mostly higher up Laurel Ridge in numerous clumps that appear later in June. The Indian pipe (monotropa uniflora) is white with scale-like leaves, its flower looking like a drooping pipe before it is pollinated. Afterwards, it turns its pipe skyward. Because it lacks chlorophyll, it cannot get energy from the sun. Hence, it is parasitic on fungal hosts, mostly in the Russula genus, which, in turn, get their energy from trees. Also called ghost plant, corpse plant, convulsion root and fits roots, the Indian pipe has recently been reclassified in the heath family (ericaceae) from the family momotropaceae. In early June, I can usually find a couple clumps of squawroot (Conopolis americana) growing along our Pit Mound Trail. Before a previous owner logged that portion of our property on Sapsucker Ridge, I found dozens of these intriguing flowers thriving among the decaying leaves of 100-year-old red oak trees. A member of the broomrape family, squawroot is parasitic on the roots of oak trees, its suckers forming large, round knobs on the host tree’s roots. The plant looks like an elongate pine cone covered with overlapping brown scales, its hooded, two-lipped, yellowish flowers set between the scales. Growing singly or in groups of several from a thickened base, one of its alternate names — bear corn — aptly describes its appearance, whereas squawgame news

Pennsylvania Game News - June 2011

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