Indian cucumber

Medeola virginiana, the Indian cucumber-root, is a delicate herbaceous perennial of the Liliaceae sensu lato (sometimes segregated as Medeolaceae) native to the deciduous forest understorey of eastern North America. From a slender, horizontal, white, cylindrical rhizome about 5 to 8 centimetres long it sends up a single erect, slender, often woolly-stemmed shoot 30 to 75 centimetres tall. The stem bears two whorls of leaves: a lower whorl of five to nine (occasionally up to twelve) lance-shaped, parallel-veined leaves 6 to 12 centimetres long held in mid-air halfway up the stem, and an upper whorl of three to five smaller ovate to broadly ovate leaves carried just below the inflorescence. In late spring small nodding flowers with six recurved, pale yellowish-green tepals and conspicuously red-purple stigmas arise on slender pedicels from the centre of the upper whorl; in late summer these are followed by dark blue-black, inedible, berry-like fruits about 8 millimetres across, after which the bases of the upper leaves often turn a striking reddish-purple. The crisp white rhizome has a fresh, distinct cucumber flavour. The plant is widely but never abundantly distributed in shady, rich, moist, acidic forests.