Field Notes—

What Jack-In-The-Pulpit Preaches

By Curtiss Clark

One of the imperatives of the human condition is to identify and classify. From the grand moral and intellectual sweep between heaven and hell down to the binary ones and zeroes that underlie our various computer technologies, we identify things as being this or that, park them in pigeonholes, and hope they stay there long enough for us to gain some understanding of the world.

The irony is that we ourselves change the world so much through all our classifying and sorting that the whole exercise becomes futile.

Thank goodness for the jack-in-the-pulpit.

After more than 50 years in Connecticut, you would think I’d get to know the place, but the “land of steady habits” has a persistent predilection for change so that neighborhoods, towns, and whole regions look nothing like they did when I was a kid.

In the late 1950s, before childhood moved indoors, we spent all our nonschool waking hours outside. We gathered grass stains and sap on our clothing, dammed up brooks, built forts in the woods, and generally stayed out of range of the parental call.

For the most part, children sort life into two basic categories: fun and not fun. I remember learning to identify my first woodland plant — the jack-in-the-pulpit — while still a child. The limitless manifestations of the natural world still have me regularly consulting my little library of field guides, leaving me uncertain and confused as often as not. But the quest to identify and classify remains for me securely in the fun category, even after all these years.

The jack-in-the-pulpit’s anthropomorphic name is what encourages kids to look a little closer. The little clergyman spadix lecturing from beneath the canopy of its spathe pulpit fits right into the imaginary worlds children construct in the woods. I’m not sure whether it was the curious man or the curious kid in the man that drove me to my knees in the woods the other day to get a better view of the pulpit beneath the plant’s two taller leaves. This particular jack was preaching to an attentive congregation of poison ivy, which, judging from the emerging blisters on my left hand, still clings to its own perverse version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.

Because Arisaema triphyllum (jack’s formal name) grows in damp-to-boggy bottomlands — areas left largely undeveloped and uncultivated for practical and environmental reasons — it has carved out a niche in this world where humans are not. Consequently it carries on pretty much as it has since prehistory. The plant is the same, only its name has changed. It has been known variously as Dragon root, Wake robin, Bog onion, and Indian turnip.

The plant does have a rounded, tuberous rhizome (corm) resembling an onion or small turnip, which is the most toxic part of this generally poisonous plant. It contains oxalic acid, which also can be found in some bleaches, antirust products, and metal cleaners. If you bite into the Indian turnip, you can expect burning in the mouth, swelling of the tongue and mouth, slurred speech, teary eyes, nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea. Some people get what they wish for at this point — death.

Charles F. Millspaugh, an 18th Century physician, botanist, and naturalist who wrote the classic American Medicinal Plants, described these toxic effects as the origin of another common name for Arisaema triphyllum: “This action upon the mouths of school-boys, who often play the trick of inviting bites of the corm upon each other, gave rise to the common name, ‘memory root,’ as they never forget its effects.”

I am surprised and grateful that this schoolboy trick did not survive into the 1950s.

Somehow American Indians discovered that by boiling and/or drying the root of this “turnip,” they could neutralize its toxic effects to the point where beneficial medicinal properties emerged. They used it to treat colds, coughs, fevers, eye sores, snakebites, and as a purgative. In the mid-19th Century, Indian turnip was showing up in patent medicines and poultices, described in the contemporary King’s American Dispensatory as an effective treatment for flatulence, croup, whooping cough, stomatitis, asthma, chronic laryngitis, bronchitis, pains in the chest, colic, scrofulous tumors, cutaneous diseases, and, appropriately, “minister’s sore throat.” (If you listen closely, you can hear jack croaking.)

For me, jack-in-the-pulpit is a balm for change-induced dizziness. No special preparation of the plant is necessary. All I have to do is get myself into the woods and look at it. It’s right where it’s supposed to be, eternally preaching the virtues of life’s constancy through the past, present, and future. It’s a message beyond classification that brings us ever closer to understanding the world.