Skunk Cabbage Flowering

If you look up, there are numerous trees (poplar, willow, some maples) that have opened their flower buds and are in the midst of being pollinated.  However if you look down, the reproduction of forest floor plants has yet to begin except for the early-blossoming Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). The flowers appear before the leaves and have a mottled maroon hood-like leaf called a spathe, which surrounds a knob-like structure called a spadix. The spadix is actually a fleshy spike of many petal-less flowers. Female flowers form first, followed by male flowers.

 Because it can create heat through a process called thermogenesis (one of few flowering plants capable of doing so), Skunk Cabbage can be seen melting its way through several inches of snow.  This early maturation benefits the few pollinators such as flies, springtails and beetles that are active now, providing them with both food (pollen) as well as a mini-warming hut for temperatures that are still below freezing some days and nights. (Fueled by energy stored in the plant’s modified underground stem (rhizome), skunk cabbage can maintain temperatures of up to 70° F. within the spathe even as external air temperatures drop below freezing.)

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