Plant of the Week
Devil's Walking Stick
Latin: Aralia spinosa
Plant names are intriguing. Good ones rely on descriptive, colloquial
word-play to give even the uninformed some sense of what the plant must be like.
Devil's Walking Stick, also known as Hercules' Club, conjures scenes of mythical
proportions, but it is doubtful that the devil ever used the small native tree
as a staff or that Hercules made a club from its spiny trunk.
Devil's Walking Stick, Aralia spinosa, is a 30-foot tall tree native
in the southeast and as far north as southern Illinois. It is found throughout
Arkansas and shares close kinship with English ivy, ginseng and the houseplant
Schefflera. It often is found as an understory tree, peeking out from under the
skirt of a forest canopy along the edges of roadways where the light conditions
are more to its liking.
This tree suckers from the roots and usually is found with the original,
larger tree standing in the midst of a small grove of head high erect,
unbranched rake-handle sized stems. All of the stems, but especially the
younger, unbranched ones, are covered with quarter inch long prickles. Larger
trees are seldom met with, but when the tree is grown in full sun, it develops
an oval outline with the accompanying stout-stemmed suckers standing at
attention in its shadow.
The leaves are twice or thrice pinnately compound with individual leaflets
two inches long. The entire compound leaf sometimes reaches five feet in length.
The stout petiole half encircles the stout stems to keep it in place. In the
fall the leaves are yellow to purple.
While the stout stems and large leaves are interesting, it is the flowers and
subsequent fruit that get devil's walking stick noticed in the woodlands. In mid
summer it produces large, greenish-white panicles at the ends of the stout
branches. They are composed of hundreds of ping-pong sized umbels and may be two
feet across. The umbels are followed in the fall by dense clusters of purple,
pea-sized berries that bow the stems over with their weight.
Despite its unique shape and interesting appearance, the tree has had little
use in the medicines and folklore of Native Americans. The late W. C. Young, a
former county agent who grew up in the Ouachita Mountains, once told me that as
a child he heard the tree called "toothache tree." A Frenchman, writing in his
history of Louisiana in the late 1700's mentions that the inner bark of the tree
is pealed, and a pea-sized ball is clamped on the offending tooth. Reports out
of Virginia suggest that the leaves are poisonous to cattle. Its wood is useless
even as firewood.
Devil's Walking Stick was popular in landscaping only during the Empire
building period of the late 19th century. As the giants of the oil, railroad and
banking industries began building their East coast homes after 1880, they
launched a wholehearted attack on good and common sense. Wooden gingerbread on
the eaves and cast iron mastiffs on the lawn were all the rage. And they
showcased in their landscapes bizarre plants forms such as weeping mulberry,
Harry Lauder's Walking Stick and Devil's Walking Stick.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist
- Ornamentals
Extension News -
October 5, 2001
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