
Fruiting jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphylla)
When I in was in western New York last month, visiting my parents, I took a walk in the woods behind their house--the house where I grew up, another lifetime ago--and spotted something brilliant red in the distance. It turned out to be a jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphylla) bearing its fruits among the poison ivy and detritus of decades of neglect. Not far away I spotted a patch of them, and near those, another even larger.