Wild sarsaparilla in my backyard!!
EDIT to add my original post because I suck at reddit, haha.
I went down the native gardening rabbit hole starting last fall on my 0.5 acre lot in Cape Cod, MA. The front garden has been getting lots of love, but the wooded area out back has been mostly just a bummer of invasives management. I would love to buy a thousand thousand plant starts and go nuts all over, but budget obviously won't allow and all my winter sown seedlings are still so teeny tiny. Anyway, I was out tromping around there yesterday with my mean scowl and came across this plant... I saw it was clearly rhizomatous and thought oh boy here we go again... turns out it is ARALIA NUDICAULIS aka WILD SARSAPARILLA aka a NATIVE PLANT for my weird little ecoregion 84 (Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens)!!!! I jumped with joy!!! It it not always easy to find native plants for my ecoregion, plus I didn't even do anything to put this here... it just appeared as a springtime blessing to my wooded area!!!
Don't mind the tool, just getting my phone camera to focus right :)