Out there in those cold snowy woods, smelly cabbages are breaking the laws of normal life.  They are doing so with impungentcy,…er, I mean impunity. Animals, specifically mammals and birds, are supposed to be the only warm-blooded life forms on earth. That certainty is called into question by the very presence of a plant called the Skunk Cabbage. This is a non-sentient being that has the ability to generate heat and create its own weather systems. Come March time, it joins the hot-blooded ranks.

  Skunk cabbages grow in the marshy bottomlands adjacent to woodland streams throughout N.E. North America.  Under the cover of late winter snow this feisty plant takes control of the situation.  While regular plants have to wait months for the weather to break, the “skunk” proceeds to melt its way through the surrounding prison of snow and ice like a light saber through a metal door. Therefore, your first seasonal encounter with this plant will look like this (take a gander). You’ll see what looks like a purplish green speckled elf cap sticking up out of the frozen stuff.  This hood is called a spathe and it envelops a flowering spike within called the spadix (which you can see in this view).

  Beneath the mucky ground, a thick stem – or rhizome – supports the fleshy growth.  Through a process officially called “cyanide resistant cellular respiration” the starchy stem provides backup for its un-worldly flower in the form of heat generation. This un-plantlike behavior produces a core temperature around 60 degrees – a level typically 30 to 40 degrees above the air temperature.  Just in case you are wondering how this cyanide what-ever thermogenesis works, I looked it up and found out that it occurs through “uncoupling oxidative phosphorylation from the electron transport system.”  In other words, the thing heats up through some magical process whose explanation takes all the fun out of it (just like trying to explain how a fictional light saber works). Suffice it to say, these little cabbages begin to boil.

  The hot little flowers are then able to burn through the season and corner the extreme early season pollination market.  Believe it or not, there are some hardy flies, bees, and wasps that fly in late winter and they are lured to the promise of a hot meal.   But, all insect comers are left disappointed as they discover that the “rotten meat” is only a sweaty plant. One could say that skunk cabbages engage in the ultimate form of vertebrate mockery by imitating rotten animals.

   There is also evidence, however, that skunk cabbages may actually depend more on wind pollination than mis-guided insect pollination.  They create their own air currents as hot air rising out of the spathe is constantly replaced by a stream of cooler air.  This incoming air potentially contains pollen from nearby “skunks.”

  No matter how you look at them, Skunk Cabbages are not your run of the mill plants.   Despite both their common and scientific names (Symplocarpus foetidus –which means “stinky plant with the connected fruit”) they don’t really smell that bad on the outside. The leaves give off a pungent skunky odor when snapped and a patch of “skunks’ will emit a musty odor, but people do that too.  The leaves look like cabbage leaves, but are far from edible because they contain nasty vertebrate unfriendly crystals of calcium oxalate. 

    As if to defy all norms, skunk cabbages grow downward to boot.  Sure, they produce upward pointing flowers and a short-lived crop of large spring leaves, but the stem itself is pulled down into the muck by the roots.  The roots probe into the soil and contract, thus keeping all permanent parts of the plant below the surface.

   There is nothing really normal about this plant, but then again what is normal?