The Urban Pantheist

Photos by cottonmanifesto

Urban species #305: Devil's walkingstick Aralia spinosa

At the margin of the confluence of several paths in Olmsted Park stands a group of small and lanky, sumac-like trees. I had passed by them dozens of times without giving them a second look--their foliage blending into the forested background. My friend Ben, a forester, took me to them one day, with a "here's something cool" tone to his voice. I was skeptical, but Ben knows his trees. Studded all along the woody stems of the plants, are tiny thorns, some simply raised bumps, others as long and sharp as thumbtack points. This, he explained, is devil's walking-stick.

Devil's walkingstick is a shrub native to southeastern North America, but can occur as far north as Maine. Its ecology is somewhat similar to sumac's: birds deposit the seeds in their droppings, and the plant colonizes disturbed soil in open areas. Once the area is shaded by forest, the devil's walkingstick gives way to other plants. It produces clusters of small blackish berries, protected by the thorny stem of the plant from the predations of mammals, who would consume the fruit without distributing the seeds efficiently. Birds can feed safely on the fruit and spread the seeds miles away from the parent plant. Humans apparently have used the fruit as some kind of analgesic, and various other parts of the plants were used for almost every medical purpose imaginable. Both the Native Americans and the European settlers valued the plant for these uses. These days the plant is used mainly by landscapers, who are most likely responsible for its presence in Olmsted park. The area where we found the devil's walkingstick, alongside a path, is constantly cleared, allowing the plant to live for many years longer than if the forest was allowed to grow around it.