Another American Adventure: The Mayapple!

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Mayapple!

This is Jubilee as she's walking through our patch of "umbrella plants" that are quickly being inundated with weeds. I've found out that what we're calling "umbrella plants" are really the "mayapples" (or Podophyllum peltatum). It is supposed to produce a fruit, or apple, in the summer.

Other names are: hogapple, Indian apple, mayflower, umbrella plant (shape of the leaves), wild lemon (flavor of the fruit), wild mandrake, American mandrake (shape of rhizomes) or "devil's apple".

And lo and behold, just where I thought I left it 6 days ago, Jubilee's leash appeared today! I wonder why I couldn't find it last week? Now I have 2 leashes.

No comments:

Post a Comment

"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.