Skunk Cabbage: March

Warm rain kicks off March. Garter snakes, chipmunks, and many amphibians leave their long hibernation underground. One plant also takes advantage of the heat wave, sending up it's bright red flowers. The eastern skunk cabbage. On a wet walk at Nobscot Scout Reservation, I realized how ahead of the whole forest the skunk cabbages were. Every plant (except for the silver maple) was exactly the way it was the whole winter. Grey. While most flowers use nectar to attract bees, wasps, and other pollinators, the skunk cabbage produces a powerful stench, to mimic an animal carcass, and attract blowflies, to pollinate the flower. The flower even turns from a maroon, to brown, or can be bright red, to look like meat.

 

The little plants are scattered all over the wetlands. They grow anywhere that is consistently moist, and gets little sunlight. The root system of a skunk cabbage is apparently around the diameter of a tree's root system, to prevent it from being uprooted, from the soft, slippery clay it grows in.