Anchorage Daily News

We hardly give devil's club a second's notice for its aesthetic appeal, even though the plant is widely distributed in coastal Alaska. It's such an accepted part of our environment, we overlook it most of the time -- until our puppies accidentally run into a patch or we have a stinging encounter we'll never forget.

But there is beauty amid the thorns. Devil's club bursts forth in spring from gray, leafless stubs poking out of the snow to become a green fortress in midsummer. Its pyramids of lime-green berry clusters transform into bright, shiny scarlet. When conditions are right, the plant can reach up to 12 feet high, as it often does in Yakutat.

In the fleeting fall, it shrivels; the prominent green stature fades. Leaves become papery textures of sepia and bold yellow, making the woods look as if large patches of underbrush had been squirted with mustard.

Julie Roller believes the forest would be a bare place without devil's club.

In Sitka, Roller has been trying to propagate it on a small-scale basis. She has been working with Bob Gorman, a resource development agent of the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, on a federally funded project called the Sitka Native Plant Propagation Program.

Roller, Gorman and others at the service have been experimenting with 10 Alaska native plant species to see if they might have some economic application -- whether they could be grown for Alaska residential landscape uses, for example. Besides devil's club, the project is examining crowberry, twinflower and red huckleberry, to name a few.

Roller, a member of the Sitka Tree and Landscape Committee, has been helping to reassess some of the uglier, paved-over parts of town, suggesting how they might be redesigned. These public eyesores could be improved by revegetating them with native plants and shrubs. Some Sitkans include devil's club in their pocket gardens, part of a movement to bring more native plants into the personal landscape arena.

But it's hard to duplicate Mother Nature, Roller says.

"Sticking geraniums in a pot is one thing, but working with devil's club in a scientific study is quite another."

She has a greater appreciation for the effort the plant has to make in the wild to grow, and she knows how much effort it takes to duplicate devil's club horticulturally.

Devil's club spreads rhizomically. As stems grow tall or get pushed over by the elements -- rains, snows, winds -- it has the ability to root itself by layering. That's how it clones itself, Roller says. In its natural state, devil's club is rarely reproduced by seedlings.

In summer 2004, Roller carefully took 30 cuttings from 40 wild plants, right before the devil's club buds broke open. She applied a high-grade rooting hormone and mixed a growing medium with two parts peat and one part sand, using a 6-inch-deep plastic flat for the cuttings.

But this was all rather iffy, as her records reveal. So far, the success rate is low. In the first year, only two of the 30 cuttings survived.

"When I tell people I'm working with devil's club, they think it's hilarious," said Roller, who's pursing a horticulture degree in British Columbia. "At the U.S. Forest Service (where Roller worked), it's the bane of our existence because it's so hard to get through. But devil's club has a lot of character."