Description & Overview
Devil’s Walking Stick (Aralia spinosa) is an upright, suckering small tree or large shrub with interesting foliage, large, showy flowers, and juicy dark-colored fruits. It’s most well-known for its stout, sharp spines found on the trunk, leaf stalks, stems, and branches.
You may also know Aralia spinosa as Hercules’ Club or Prickly Ash. Although, this plant is not to be confused with Zanthoxylum americanum, whose common name is Prickly Ash.
Core Characteristics
Category: Tree
Wisconsin Native: No - Native to North America
USDA Hardiness Zone: to zone 4
Mature Height: 10-20 feet
Mature Spread: 6-10 feet
Growth Rate: Moderate
Growth Form: Upright. Suckering. Thicket-forming.
Light Requirements: Full Sun to Partial Shade
Site Requirements: Grows well in average soils with medium moisture levels. Adaptable.
Flower: Large, showy umbrella-shaped clusters of creamy white flowers.
Bloom Period: July to August
Foliage: Medium to dark green. Bipinnate to tripinnately compound.
Fall Color: Pale yellow to purple-bronze.
Urban Approved: No
Fruit Notes: Compact cluster of fleshy, spherical purple-black drupes. Ripen in late summer to fall.
Suggested Uses
Devil’s Walking Stick’s native range is much of the East to Southeast part of the country, stretching to the Midwest as far as Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. You’ll find it naturally occurring in upland and lowland woodlands, wooded slopes and ravines, woodland borders, and wooded areas along streams, and it can also be found in savannas.
This plant is adaptable and can be grown at various sites. It’s not picky about soil type or textures. However, it prefers moist, well-draining soil but is tolerant of drought and won’t throw a fit if grown in average soil.
Devil’s Walking Stick has an exotic look with many interesting characteristics. Mostly, this plant grows upright and is mostly unbranched, ringed with sharp spines and conspicuous leaf scars.
The trunk is typically relatively sparse until you reach the crown. The crown is topped with a large umbrella-like canopy filled with large alternately growing, bipinnately, or sometimes tripinnately compound foliage. Each leaflet has toothed margins and is approximately 2-4” long. Aralia spinosa produces large, showy clusters of creamy white umbellose panicles that can reach up to 2 feet long! These flowers are upright, appearing above the foliage. The flowers are followed by clusters of tiny purple-black berries, which ripen from late summer to fall.
Colonizer: Devil’s Walking Stick is tolerant of drought, clay soils, and many urban pollutants, but its spreading nature and abundant thorns prevent it from being considered urban-approved. It spreads quickly by self-seeding and suckering to form thickets or colonies.
It would be best to site this plant in locations protected from strong winds to help preserve the compound foliage. This plant has many ornamental qualities worth being shown off in a landscape; just be mindful of its spreading habit.
Wildlife Value
There are many faunal associates of Aralia spinosa. Pollinators adore the Devil’s Walking Stick. You can expect to see a wide variety of insects visiting the flowers, such as the bumblebee, carpenter bee, sweat bee, scoliid wasp, leatherwing beetle, flower scarab beetle, and the great golden digger wasp.
Butterflies and moths such as Tiger Swallowtail, Silver-spotted Skipper, Red-banded Hairstreak, and Horace’s Duskywing can also be seen visiting Devil’s Walking Stick.
Wildlife: Insects aren’t the only benefactors; the fruit is edible and coveted by many birds, such as Wood Thrush, Cardinal, Sparrow, and Cedar Waxwing. Mammalian browsers and foragers such as Red Foxes, Raccoons, Skunks, Black Bears, and Opossums will all enjoy the fruit.
Domesticated: Be mindful that you and your domesticated pets (i.e. dogs, cats) should avoid eating the fruit. They are at most mildly toxic and may cause an upset stomach.
Maintenance Tips
Promptly remove root suckers to prevent unwanted naturalization.
We invite you to check out the Arborist For Hire lookup at the Wisconsin Arborist Association website to find an ISA-certified arborist near you.
Pests/Problems
Devil’s Walking Stick is a tough, adaptable plant that is free from any severe pest or disease problems.
It may be susceptible to more common issues like leaf spots and aphids, but these problems are hardly worth mentioning. Very few insects feed destructively on Aralia spinosa. Sometimes this plant may be defoliated earlier by the polyphagous margined blister beetle, although this is an uncommon occurrence and is rarely fatal.
Leaf Lore
The genus Aralia comes from the Latinization of the old French-Canadian name ‘Aralie.’ The specific epithet spinosa means “spiny.”
Aralia spinosa was also known as the toothache tree. According to Le Page du Praz in his History of Louisana (1758), as quoted in Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees (1950), “the inner bark has the property of curing the toothache. The patient rolls it up the size of a bean, and puts it upon the aching tooth.” Steven Foster and James A. Duke also suggest this remedy in A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants (1990) that a “tincture of berries was also used for toothaches.”
To be clear, we do not promote using Aralia spinosa to treat any ailment. The fresh bark is strongly emetic, purgative, diaphoretic, and sialagogue. Handling its bark and roots may cause allergic skin reactions.
Companion Plants
Because Devil’s Walking Stick is adaptable to various sites, it can be paired with many compatible companion plants. If your goal is to utilize this plant’s spreading, thicket-forming habit, consider pairing it with other colonizing plants such as Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) or American Plum (Prunus americana). Similar to Devil’s Walking Stick, Prickly Ash(Zanthoxylum americanum) can be used to create a living barbed-wire fence.
Devil’s Walking Stick’s shade tolerance would allow it to live in the understory of larger growing trees so long as they don’t cast heavy shade.
Aralia spinosa is a relative of one of our favorite Wisconsin native perennial, Spikenard (Aralia racemosa). Spikenard is a great plant, very shade tolerant with similar-looking flowers and an impressive fruit display.
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Written by Miles Minter
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