Arrowroot grows naturally on the floor of moist evergreen and deciduous forests from Mexico to Brazil, reaching up to 5 feet in clearings where filtered light reaches the ground. Its common name is not botanical but medical — indigenous peoples used it as a poultice to draw poison from arrow wounds, a quality that impressed early colonists enough to name the plant accordingly. The scientific name is more scholarly: Maranta honors Bartolomea Maranta, a 16th-century Italian physician and botanist, while arundinacea refers to the reed-like stems.

The mid-green leaves are broad and the small white spring flowers are inconspicuous, but the plant supports a surprising range of organisms from butterflies to soil microbes. It was commercially cultivated in Georgia and South Carolina in the early 1800s and remains a commercial crop on St Vincent to this day. In the continental United States, outdoor cultivation is realistically limited to southern Florida, where the combination of warmth, humidity, and rainfall required for productive growth can be reliably met. Elsewhere it performs well in containers brought indoors before temperatures drop below 41 degrees Fahrenheit.