Adder's Tongue

The adder's tongue here is the yellow trout lily, Erythronium americanum, a spring ephemeral of the lily family that grows in colonies in the woods of eastern North America, from Labrador south to Georgia and west to Mississippi and Minnesota. It grows from a small corm set deep in the soil, white and starchy inside, and its white bulb's shape gives it the name dogtooth violet. A flowering plant raises two basal leaves mottled with brown, grey or purple, a pattern likened to the markings of a brook trout, and one nodding yellow flower whose six petal-like segments curl back. It blooms early in spring, before the canopy above it leafs out, and the flowers close at night; a plant may go four to seven years before it first flowers. Some colonies have been dated to three hundred years old. In nineteenth-century America the trout lily was reckoned an aphrodisiac. Cunningham gives it a healing charm: soak the herb in cold water, bind it in cloth over a wound or bruise until it grows warm, then bury it in muddy ground. Kynes notes that it is endangered or threatened in some places, and asks anyone who finds it wild to sense its energy, state their purpose, and send it healing before leaving.