Some years ago in late September, a plant identification workshop I was leading happened to be botanizing the Alarka Laurel section of the Cowee Mountain Range near where Macon, Jackson, and Swain counties corner. (The site, which is the headwaters basin for Alarka Creek, has since become a protected part of the Nantahala National Forest.) Walking along the Spruce Trail at about 4,000-feet elevation, we came to the old Nancy Green home site, which was maintained in this ethereal upland setting until about the 1930s.

Apple trees and other domesticated plants common to such sites were in evidence. But the most curious item by far was a stand of shrubby trees armed with prickly spines on their bare trunks and topped by plumes of black fruit.

Often overlooked, it’s nevertheless a frequent species throughout the region. And it’s one that warrants closer attention due to a growth pattern that resembles a palm tree and interesting human associations as a toothache remedy and ornamental curiosity.

Several in the group knew the plant by one or more of its various common names: Devil’s Walking Stick, Spikenard, Prickly Ash, Tear Blanket, Hercules Club or Toothache Tree. The species designation “spinosa” obviously derives from the thorns lining the main trunk and leaf stalks that are referred to in the first four of the common names cited above. Hercules Club as a common name probably arose, in part, because of the overall appearance of the tree, which features a long, bare trunk topped by a club-like panicle of flowers or fruit; and, in part, because of its resemblance to another coastal plant of the same common name and general appearance also bearing thorns. The Hercules’ Club of the coast has a humdinger of a scientific name: “Zanthoxylum clava-herculis.”

The mountain species under discussion here — which we’ll refer to as Devil’s Walking Stick, since that is such an evocative common name and has wide acceptance when applied to the species-most often comes to our attention when we’re headed down a steep slope, reaching out to grab tree and sapling trunks so as to keep from falling. Once you grab a handful of Devil’s Walking Stick, it makes you pay attention.

Back in earlier times — when our ancestors were, for the most part, more keenly aware of the plant and animal life around them than we are today — every tree, shrub, vine, herb, fern, moss, and lichen was a part of their everyday world and tested for its practical use or for food and medicinal values. Those that had actual or supposed medicinal properties were esteemed and sometimes cultivated so as to be nearby when required.

Devil’s Walking Stick was one of those easily cultivated items that had a wonderful use. When you’ve got a bad tooth and no dentist, you’ll try anything, including popping the sucker out with pliers. According to Donald Culross Peattie in his 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, puts it upon the aching tooth, and chews it until the pain eases.”

The white settlers probably learned this application from the Cherokees. Chiltoskey and Hamel in Cherokee Plants: Their Uses — A 400 Year History (1975) state that various parts of the plant were not only used for “ache of decaying teeth” but as a root-salve for sores and paralysis as well as being a root-tea for a variety of other ailments.

In closing, I can’t help but quote Peattie on yet another of its human associations: “Back in the last century when trees were cultivated for their very grotesqueness, this strange, clumsy, disproportionate, at once pretentious and yet somehow insignificant little tree or tall shrub was in fashion. With the cast-iron mastiff on the lawn, the wooden gingerbread on the eaves, or, if the mansion were stone, the castellated roof, a fine, flourishing, horrendous specimen of Hercules Club produced an effect which might wake envy in the bosoms of less fortunate neighbors.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.