Edible Canna

An erect perennial to around 1.5m tall with ovate, green leaves. Racemes of small red or dark orange flowers. 

It is native to the Americas and naturalised elsewhere. The edible rhizomes are a source of starch. A food crop cultivated by indigenous peoples of the Americas for thousands of years. They can be eaten raw, but are usually baked. Cooked, the rhizomes become translucent, mucilaginous, and sweet. The starch is occasionally marketed commercially as "arrowroot" and was an ingredient in mid-19th-century recipes such as cakes and baby food.

The seeds are small, globular, black pellets, hard and dense enough to sink in water. They resemble shotgun pellets giving rise to the plant's common name of Indian shot. They are hard enough to shoot through wood and still survive and later germinate.