Dragon-arum

Arisaema dracontium, the green dragon or dragon-arum, is a perennial herbaceous plant in the Araceae native to moist deciduous forests, floodplains, and seepages of eastern North America from southern Quebec and Ontario south to Florida and Texas. Plants arise from a flattened, depressed-globose corm and produce a single solitary leaf and a separate flowering shoot each season. The leaf is divided pedately into 5 to 15 oblong-elliptic to lanceolate leaflets arranged in a horseshoe along a curving rachis at the top of a long petiole, reaching 30 to 100 centimetres in height. The inflorescence is a pale green spathe loosely enveloping a narrow spadix whose sterile appendage is greatly elongated into a slender, tail-like, yellowish projection extending 7 to 20 centimetres beyond the spathe (the dragon's tongue). Tiny unisexual flowers occur at the spadix base; pollinated female plants produce a tight cluster of bright orange-red berries in late summer. All parts contain calcium oxalate raphides.