Dave Taft Plants offer pollinators many rewards â€" nectar, pollen, even perfumes for attracting the perfect mate. Not many offer heat. During the cold days of spring, the Eastern skunk cabbage offers insects a warm, dark place to eat and sleep.
Skunk cabbage can bloom in our area as early as February, a time when snow and ice blankets the wet woods. Evolution has guided it to a series of highly unusual adaptations through which the plant (Symplocarpus foetidus) attracts spring’s earliest insect pollinators.
Naturalists only half-kiddingly note that skunk cabbage acts more like a skunk than a cabbage. The plants are thermogenic, maintaining a temperature several dozen degrees higher than their surroundings for almost two weeks during their flowering season. Like some character from a medieval bestiary, the skunk cabbage melts through ice and snow â€" as if determined to show off its remarkable flowers.
The skunk’s actual flower is tiny and petal-less. To see it, sidle up next to one in muddy sphagnum moss, and peer into the widened slit at one side of the flower’s dark hood, or spathe, to use the technical term. Inside, the flowers are aligned on a fleshy stem called a spadix. This flower arrangement is typical of the Arum family, which includes plants such as the skunk cabbage, calla lily and jack-in-the-pulpit. It also includes mysterious tropical plants like the voodoo lily and houseplants like philodendrons.
The spathe is the most visible part of the skunk cabbage’s flower, and it evokes nothing so much as dead meat. It is a streaky greenish purple, or sometimes even a deep maroon color, and has evolved to imitate rotting animals. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The bright colors and floral scents of spring’s better known wildflowers are weeks away. And to insects active at this time of year, the purple sheath of a skunk cabbage’s flower and its “fragrance†are a welcome mat.
Dave Taft The scent of skunk cabbage is strongest if you have scraped or broken a plant’s developing stems or flowers. Most foul-smelling Arums (the skunk cabbage is one) release colorfully named, volatile compounds like cadaverine and putrescine, which imbue the smell of rotting flesh in a flower.
In another page out of the medieval bestiary, the skunk cabbage has contractile roots. To anchor it in the soft, waterlogged soils of wetlands, the skunk cabbage’s roots grow out from its rhizome and then contract as they mature, essentially pulling the plant deeper into the soil. As anyone who has ever tried to dig out an old plant will tell you, they are almost impossible to be rid of.
When mature, a skunk cabbage has leaves almost three feet long, but don’t look for one in the fall. Beginning in August, the plant begins to dissolve into a black goo, and by mid-September, the aboveground cabbage has vanished, leaving only seeds for the coming spring, and an underground rootstock, waiting for midwinter to reawaken.
A version of this article appears in print on 04/20/2014, on page MB4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Early Bloomer, Aptly Named.
