About ten years ago I accidentally introduced a very aggressive and invasive weed into my vegetable garden by bringing back some vegetable as a gift from a person's garden about 15 miles away from home, accidentally bringing along a piece of this weed. It looks like a small Jack-in-the-Pulpit and sometimes is called Baby Jack-in-the-Pulpit or Japanese Cowdipper. It is native to China, Korea, and Japan. It has very trifoliate compound leaves with the middle leaf being the largest and longest. It bears slender green stalks that end in a small, narrow, green arum-spathe flower with a long thin stalk filament that sticks up out of the spathe and the bottom is dark and not green. The top of the spathe has pale lines along the edges. I don't find this plant to be beautiful. Its leaves sort of fall over and the flower is not conspicuous. It is so hard to get rid of because it forms little corms (bulbs) in the soil with some thin white rhizomes that can end in a bulbil. It takes a constant war of continual hoeing non-stop or other attacks to undo this pernicious little weed. It is supposed to have some medicinal properties in Asian medicine if one really knows what one is doing; otherwise has some toxicity.

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