The plant gets both its common and scientific name from the watery red juice it produces. You can find it just about anywhere in the woods. Each plant produces either male or female flowers or in some cases the plant is only a leaf and produces no jack or pulpit and therefore no flowers. A given plant can be male one year and female the next and have no flowers the next year. The outcome depends on the amount of energy stored in the corm over the growing season.
Male flowers look like threads while female flowers look like little green balls.
Once the male flowers have reproduced and released their pollen the plant will die back. The females, if fertilized, will produce the redball like fruits that brighten the forest floor in the fall. There always seems to be a profusion of vegetation on the Indian Mounds. It is interesting to speculate why this may happen. Perhaps it is because there is plenty of sun or that there is little brushy vegetation or trees on the mounds, but this can also be said for other areas where there is not the profusion of growth seen on the mounds.