Our Native Flora: You Don’t Know Jack

You know Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack of all Trades, Jack who knows Jill and Jack in the box. But have you heard of Jack in the pulpit? Even if you haven’t there’s a chance you may have seen one. He’s more likely to be in your local tree pit than a pulpit.

Jack-in-the-pulpit is a native plant, though as a member of the Arum family of plants, most of his family members, like elephant ear and calla lily, live in the tropics. Jack-in-the-pulpit grows in moist, shaded areas. When I have seen them in the wild it’s usually near a creek in forests upstate.

The scientific name for Jack-in-the-pulpit is Arisaema triphyllum. Triphyllum, in layperson’s terms, means three-leaved. Each leaf has three leaflets that end in a point. Mature plants have a special leaf that covers the flower structure in such a way that it resembles a pulpit, or an awning over a balcony. This type of leaf is called a spathe. The spadix is the flower structure that peers sternly out of the spathe like a preacher surveying forest congregants. This is Jack.

That this flower has a built-in pulpit is not its only unique feature. Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers start out as male, only containing pollen, and they change sex from year to year based on how much energy is stored in its roots. Besides not having ovaries, there is another distinction between the male flower and the female flower. The male flower has an escape hatch at its base for fungus gnats, which are Jack-in-the-pulpit’s main pollinator. The escaped gnats can continue visiting Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers and gathering pollen.

Until they can’t. Female flowers do not have an escape hatch. This is certainly not a fair bargain for services rendered, but perhaps the struggles of the pollen-laden gnats knocking around a flower they can’t escape is necessary for pollination. As the summer transitions to fall the female flower will wither, melting into the leaf duff, leaving no trace except a poisonous cluster of fire engine berries that rest on the forest floor, like leftovers from a post-sermon fairy picnic.

Jack-in-the-pulpit is unique but not flashy and I’ve never known anyone to plant them intentionally. Instead, they’ve planted themselves around Sunset Park, seemingly unaware that they’re not in a rich, loamy woodland threaded with streams and creeks.

“I have so many Jack-in-the-pulpit in my yard and I have no idea where they came from,” one friend told me recently—then another echoed the same, and before long, I found myself gifted with a small, spontaneous surplus.

On the way to visit one of these friends on 46th Street, where I used to live, I spotted another jack-in-the-pulpit. This one was not growing in the same rich, moist loam my friend’s yard had. It was in a tree pit, growing less than three feet away from parked cars on a patch of soil with a higher population of cigarette butts than earthworms. Far from bemoaning its lot in life, the jack-in-the-pulpit held its leaf stalks high, and underneath them were not one but two flowers forming.

Near the bottom of the block is my friend’s tree pit. It is protected by a fence erected by her husband, a woodworker, and has a lush community of plants including a cluster of jack-in-the-pulpits. She is pretty sure that her population of Jack-in-the-pulpits is from a volunteer plant that hitched a ride with a shrub she bought at a local native plant nursery. They have made her yard and tree pit their own. In a way they always have been, and there are maps to prove it.

Eymund Diegel, a longtime Sunset Park resident and mapmaker, layered three maps on top of one another to create the following:

Mapmaker Eymund Diegel layered three maps to reveal Sunset Park’s lost ecosystems and hidden waterways. Image by Eymund Diegel..jpg)

One of the maps is the 1782 Stevens facsimile British headquarters map that displays Sunset Park’s original ecosystems, one shows the neighborhood’s hidden waterways, and one is the street grid. Sure enough, a creek used to run through my friend’s yard. It would have run through all the yards of the block, originating at a pond that used to be near the 44th and 6th Avenue entrance of the park. In a forest setting we would say that it would have meandered downhill, bending this way and that. Since its path now lives on a grid, we can say that it crosses 44th Street, passes through one of the co-ops across from the park before going halfway down the block. People grilling in their yards, kids playing basketball, people stepping out for a smoke, all would have seen it gurgling past before it crossed 45th Street, through someone’s brownstone and back into the yards between 45th and 46th Street.

The creek is gone, but its footprint seems to have remained. The constantly wet spot in the back of my friend’s yard may be a reminder, so too are the Jack-in-the-pulpits.

This article is part of a series exploring the flora native to Sunset Park.