Sagittaria is a genus of about 30 species of aquatic plants whose members go by a variety of common names, including arrowhead, duck potato, swamp potato, tule potato, and wapato. Most are native to South, Central, and North America, but there are also some from Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Description

Sagittaria plant stock (the perennial rhizome) is a horizontal creeper (stoloniferous). The leaf grows up to .3-.9 m tall, with a shape resembling an arrowhead. Between July and September, a single stalk bears groups of three white flowers with three petals each. It is obliquely obovate, the margins winged, with an apical or ventral beak; in other words, they are a small, dry, one-seeded fruit that do not open to release the seed, set on a slant, narrower at the base, with winged edges, and having a "beaked" aperture (one side longer than the other) for sprouting, set above or below the fruit body.

Taxonomy

Species

accepted species include:

Deprecated

Etymology

The genus comes from the Latin word sagittārius, meaning 'pertaining to arrows', owing to the leaf shape of many species.

Uses

Many species have edible roots, prized for millennia as a reliable source of starch and carbohydrates, even during the winter. Some are edible raw, though are less bitter when cooked. They can be harvested by hand or by treading the mud in late fall or early spring, causing light root tubers to float to the surface. The plants are easy to propagate by replanting the roots. Native American peoples such as the Algonquian, Omaha, Pawnee, and Winnebago used the tubers for food, prepared by boiling or roasting. They were also planted and eaten in China.

In culture

Other names are Pshitola (Dakota), Si" (Omaha-Ponca), Si-poro (Winnebago) and Kirit (Pawnee), 'cricket' (from the likeness of the tuber to the form of a cricket); known also as kits-hat, 'standing in water', the tuber being termed kirit. Sagittaria is mentioned in the Omaha myths "Ishtinike and the Four Creators" and "How the Big Turtle Went to War". In 1749, Peter Kalm mentioned Sagittaria as a food plant among the Algonquian peoples: "Katniss is another Indian name of a plant, the root of which they were likewise accustomed to eat, ... It grows in low, muddy, and very wet ground. The root is oblong, commonly an inch and a half long, and one inch and a quarter broad in the middle; but some of the roots have been as big as a man’s fists. The Indians either boiled this root or roasted it in hot ashes. ... Their katniss is an arrow-head or Sagittaria, and is only a variety of the Swedish arrow-head or Sagittaria sagittifolia, for the plant above the ground is entirely the same, but the root under ground is much greater in the American than in the European."American explorers Lewis and Clark used arrowhead tubers to survive the winter of 1805–1806. Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games franchise was named after Sagittaria.