Description
This is a decidedly spooky looking plant. Whenever I stumble across one or a group of them I startle just a bit; similar to that little jump you feel when you see a perfectly harmless garter snake slithering in the grass. Maybe its because of the hood like look of the spathe, a bract that wraps around and sometimes folds over the spadix, the organ bearing part of the flower. It looks a little like a cobra, if we actually had cobras in Maine. Who knows, maybe with the rate that the climate is changing, Maine will be habitable to cobras in a few years. (Bad joke, I know.)
Jack in the pulpit belongs to the Araceae family, which is largely tropical in nature. Jack in the pulpit is definitely an outlier here in the chilly north. But despite its tropical heritage, it is right at home and is actually a pretty straight forward plant to please. It does well in the the shade garden, in upland soils with a decent amount of moisture retentive organic matter. But then again, I remember my aunt showing me some growing in the sandy shoulder of a road when I was a child. Yet again, it goes to show that like so many or our natives, it’s very adaptable. In the wild we see it usually associated with forested wetlands, growing either in bare mucky soils or in sphagnum moss. Self seeds when it’s in a happy place. The root is a neatly dividable bulb, which makes for easy division and propagation.
1 gallon sized plants for $16
