One of PEI’s most common woodland plants is often overlooked, occasionally misidentified, and fruiting now. Meet Sarsaparilla (pronounced ‘sass-parilla’, Aralia nudicaulis). Sarsaparilla is about 30 to 45 centimetres (a foot to 1.5 feet) tall and is divided into three branches, each with three to five leaflets (main photo). Those leaflets are often reddish when they first appear in spring, and they turn red again in fall. This, coupled with the old saying “leaves of three,

Last week, we looked at how and why mammals such as Raccoon and Skunk were introduced to PEI in the early 1900s. These were among our...

Releasing new species into the wild is generally frowned upon today, but this wasn’t always the case, and the 1940s were the heyday of...