That's Mayapple!

A forest of umbrellas

May 10, 2025

ALSO KNOWN AS: , “OO-NEE-SQUA-TOO-KEY” (“it wears a hat” in Cherokee), “CHE-SA-NE-PE-SHA” (“it pains the bowels” in Osage), American mandrake, wild mandrake, Podophyllum peltatum, ground lemon, duck’s foot, hog apple, wild lemon, raccoon berry, love apples

At a distance:

Unmistakable shield umbrella leaves in the northeastern forest.
They are related to the buttercup, anemone, and even the calafate.
Mayapple has been used as a medicine for thousands of years, mostly to treat warts.
In the perfect moment when the skin is golden, its small fruit is sweet, other than that, the plant is toxic.

Mayapple (P. peltatum) flower, Uwharrie National Forest, North Carolina, April 2019, **Date:** 18 April 2019, **Author:** Wasrts, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mayapple_flower_1.jpg

I found mayapple in Virginia on a walk beside Belle Isle in Richmond. The sun beamed down with spring’s brilliance and the leaves were new in the trees, barely big enough to touch the ground with their shadows. I optimistically collected cuttings of ivy that would soon die in Brooklyn. On the other side of the water, Belle Isle loomed long on the James River where iron manufacturing once clanged, where Union soldiers died, at the foot of the South’s capital. So much sadness here - even when the warmth wrapped the place so gently. The dog sniffed at my feet. He might have seen the blooms from down there: hidden white eyes among the stalks, but all I saw was a platform of leaves. I thought of a fairy’s stage, if I was dust I could dance on them. Mayapples are arresting. Like they look weird, green splats over the soil. They are massive compared to other plants their height: a single rounded leaf.

An Umbrella Community

Before the leaves unfurl in the spring trees, the lowlands and the wet forest floors are active. Spring ephemerals wait for the perfect time and then jump into action with all of the audacity that spring requires. Spring is a shout in winter’s silence - right in between the luscious days of late spring and the barren winter, these short blooming plants grow in the delicate new months between March and May. These ephemerals are visible for no longer than a month at a time, but they have worked all year to prepare themselves for their blooming. Usually their vitality is in a thick root that survives for years at at time below the soil.

A single bone of a root makes up the colony of the mayapple. The mayapple will grow as the leaves above them mature, they don’t mind a good amount of shade. And they’re always in colonies. From a distance they look like one thousand wayward umbrella dancers in the forest.

Several days after the last frost the forest of the mayapple is the first forest of the forest spanning from the southeastern US to the northeast US and into Ontario. These leaves are completely flat at the top. The leaf can be a foot long, as wide as the plant is tall. They have five to nine deep lobes that meet the stem. These lobes let the water fall down, so the sun comes through just enough to warm the soil. The stem is connected to their center in a leaf formation called “peltatum” meaning their stems are attached to the undersides of their leaves like a shield. Peltatum means shield, but I also see a hand holding a platter.

The mayapple has unlikely relatives. It is in the barberry family so it’s related to the calafate, though it is perhaps the furthest from a shrub. At most, it has two leaves each atop the ends of a Y shaped stem. Each leaf is massive compared to the tiny white flower that is no bigger than a star, caught in a tree at night. And the ones that only have one stem, don’t have a flower at all. They need that Y shaped nest to bloom. And you might see the ranunculus in the flower - the buttercup relation. It is, too, a ranunculus, which you can see in the talon anthers and waxy petals. Flowers don’t need the sun, they raise their heads so they might be noticed by the wind-brought insects with insatiable hunger.

The flower is waxy, white, and complete with a range of six to nine petals. Pollinated by bumblebee and long tongued insects and pollinators - but they don’t really produce pollen. They have an abundance of pollen in that single flower.

Queen bees, in particular, are attracted to the musky smell - with their refined pallets.

The mayapple blooms in early May and bears fruits about a month later. Time will pass, and for a moment this single fruit will be golden, this is when it is ripe. They’re not big food for animals in the forest because they’re toxic even to them. The fruits can only be eaten by humans when they are exactly ripe. If they are underripe, they’re toxic, if they’re overripe, same. The seeds are toxic and must be taken out. The plant is generally - toxic. Even so, you may have heard of mayapple jam. It yields the forest’s pineapple because of the resemblance in taste, but it looks like guava fruit. The jelly maker would have to watch like a hawk at the threshold of the forest - looking for the toxic fruit to turn, from a bright green to a soft yellow. How fast you have to be to descend upon the plants once they do change.

Just like umbrellas they come out of the ground with that little node at the top of the stem. And they don’t like the sun. The sunnier the location the sooner they’ll senesce, or go dormant. Midsummer is their final call before they redden droop and return to the earth. They are signifier species because the only way they survive is through a highly nutritive soil, and they live in collaboration with mycorrhizal connections.

The plant is particular about the kind of visitors it favors. Small mammals eat from them, like squirrels, mice, oppossum, fox, bear, and sometimes deer. They’re the main food for box turtles who are their main seed dispersers. They’re the larval food of sawflies and the golden borer moth.

Though they don’t rely on seeds alone to germinate because their roots are so strong. But once that single seed germinates it might swoop over a swath of forest floor with dozens of plants. Once a colony is formed it can live for one hundred years.

And then one day in July they will be gone. Every remnant of the colony will disappear and return into the earth waiting the hot summer out for spring to return again.

Take My Warts Away With You

From the age of 17 until about 23, I had warts that would not leave. From the time I found the first one on my foot at 17. They continued to pop up all over my fingers and feet. until I - in a desperate act - with nothing else to do - I started using tea tree oil on them (“as if this hippy stuff will work” I thought). Surprisingly it did.

But in those ugly years, there were evenings in my Bushwick apartment when I would take scissors to them. For those of you who have been overcome with warts you may know how it feels to decapitate those white headed foot-mushrooms. It’s a kind of diabolical itch that is scratched when the wet pearly skin comes off in your hand, only to grow back. You know it will always grow back.

The mayapple’s Latin name is Podophyllum peltatum. Podo: foot is in the name. This plant has been processed to treat plantar warts. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, the Frenchman who formulated the western name for this plant thought they looked like goose feet - the goose gods I might add: they’re giant. And maybe he was thinking of goose gods. He studied theology before he turned to botany and went on to be the first to classify plants with two names: One that denotes the family and the second as a description. Yet Tournefort missed an important aspect to plants as a whole. He did not believe in the sexuality of plants. Strange because this plant points to its sexuality, there between its legs. And yet, it doesn’t rely on it. Can we imagine a plant considering sex for pleasure, or just to jostle up the pool of DNA?

So here we are with giant geese feet. Anapodophyilim used to mean duck’s foot. Now it’s just podophyllum: foot leaf.

Settlers to the Americas called this mandrake: the terrible and beautiful equivalent of the Mandragora officinarum in the old world because both species would cause such vomitting. Throughout the Eastern Indigenous cultures this plant has been used a purgative for millennia - which the body sometimes needs. They block cellular division, so it is still used in a range of cancer treatments. Podophyllotoxin and podophyllin are in the plant, both of which are toxic but the podophyllotoxin is used in prescription drugs to treat warts - specifically genital warts. Through that which makes it toxic, this phytotoxin causes dermatitis, so care should be used when even touching the plant.

I imagine the mayapple would not grow far from wetland: a river or swamp or stream. The box turtle trundles up perhaps to the miniature forest of mayapple not far away from its sunny rocks. The turtle is slow as it moves to the grove, but it’s certain. The mayapple reminds me of places we can’t go to: forbidden groves and caves and mushroom circles. In every culture there have been taboo places. The mayapple takes up space and covers the ground in such a way that does not yield to travelers passing through, unless you are a turtle or flying above it. It doesn’t seem to think too much of visitors. It requires a password. To approach it, to get its sweetness, we must pay attention. We must take time. And then, when the moment is right, approach them with the reverence, decisiveness, and the speed of spring.

myth for mayapple

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